Draft Four: All that you touch, you Change
Do not quit in advance.
I voted for Nicușor Dan last Sunday in Romania’s presidential elections, and I’ll do it again in next Sunday’s runoff.
This letter is less an explanation of why, and more of a declaration of hope. Hope that not only can we avoid becoming a Balkan MAGA outpost, but that we can get to work to rebuild a country that doesn’t hold together anymore.
Writer Iulian Bocai described our predicament better than I ever could in this Scena9 essay on why trains are late. In short, trains are late because for thirty some years we’ve abandoned community-oriented infrastructure. As individuals we turned to our own needs, or what we understood to be freedom away from the state – because under communism, we were told, the state was the enemy. And the post-communist state also turned on itself, more or less plundering its own resources.
The market was supposed to free us all. (Spoiler: it didn’t.) It brought us here, in 2025, in a set of overlapping crises, the few strands holding the edifice together now cut. Here is Bocai:
Over the past thirty years, there has been, for better or worse, a fragile democratic majority – its fragility stemming from its superficiality – while civil society has remained a steady defender of fundamental civic principles.
What has been missing, however, is even the vaguest cultural and ethical theory of what we mean to one another – because, historically, we’ve only known how to express such things in the vocabulary of socialism, and no one wanted to return to that kind of communal ethic, even though rethinking such an ethic should have been the most important and most difficult task after the fall of communism.
We believed it was enough to hate corrupt politicians in unison, or that it was enough to locate the enemy in “the political class”, and what we shared was more often this disillusionment than a vision for a productive social future.
This is important because the 2025 presidential run-off (just as the cancelled 2024 run-off) pits two candidates that come from outside the political mainstream. Our project of making politicians the enemy is complete: we’re choosing between two outsiders, but no one is celebrating, because deep down, I think we know. They can’t fix our polarization and they can’t tell a story about future togetherness. Not without our help.
It’s important to remember that one of them won’t even try.
George Simion enjoys the wreckage. He is lost when he has to explain a vision or build. His story is one of resistance to an eternally changing cast of enemies. It’s what has made him so appealing – to football diehards in his early agitator days, to disenchanted voters now. He’s at his best when he fights: against the opposing team, against those preventing a Union between Romania and Moldova, against the Soros cabal of globalists, against the System, against vaccines, against immigrants. Simion needs enemies to win, and he’ll need enemies to survive. (He’s already said only fraud would prevent him from winning – guess where that rhetoric goes.)
Oddly, Călin Georgescu, whom Simion is trying to emulate for some extra votes, told a more positive story early on – he was for peace, for the forgotten ones, for soil, and tradition. Of course he was lying, many opportunistic saviors lie. In the beginning, the enemy was barely hinted at. As a matter of fact, in the earliest videos available on his Instagram last year, he mostly took on those that weren’t pure enough: Georgia Meloni he considered a fraud, and, of course, obliquely, he also said George Simion wasn’t pure enough. There was violence underneath that surface, and eventually, last fall, it showed. By that time, the Romanian state had already betrayed its democratic principles and reset the elections.
Simion stepped back into the arena, told a story about representing Georgescu, but I doubt he believes in that tribal vision of isolation. Simion doesn’t want to farm and worship – he wants wealth and he wants to rule. It’s why he nonchalantly panders to the less fortunate with cheap housing he can’t deliver, and which he later called “a marketing ploy”. It’s why he promises people they’ll have more cash in their pockets, and then vows to cut 500.000 free-riders that work for the state (which would likely include teachers, nurses, and so on). It’s why he can promise to bring Romanians back from abroad, while warnings immigrants to stay away.
Don’t look for ideological coherence – not in a collapsed system. (It’s funny to read international media these days trying to boil it down to a simplistic pro-Russia vs. pro-EU choice). Simion is a protectionist but exploitative late stage capitalist who despises social welfare, science, and empathy. He’s Trump, and Orban, and Milei wrapped up in the Romanian flag. And if he wins, he needs new enemies fast, as he can’t be for something – he can only be against.
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Nicușor Dan, currently the mayor of Bucharest, doesn’t tell a compelling good and evil story. There’s some anti-system rhetoric he carries from his early runs to unseat the incumbents in the Bucharest city hall, but it’s not energizing enough. That’s because he doesn’t promise to burn the system down. He wants to remake it by identifying broken processes, turning them over to who those capable of improving them, and then, strategically applying the fixes.
Simion doesn’t want trains running on time because they might connect us. Nicușor naively believes making them run on time is simply a matter of expertise. Bocai again:
To the strangeness inherent in any hard-to-govern system, Romania added another: a form of social structuring that completed the work of alienation, by creating a public space in which no one is willing to work on themselves for the sake of others – precisely because the authorities who should have done so never truly did.
This means expertise is no longer enough – not in our predicament. Before expertise comes trust, and before trust comes care, and before care comes connection. Expertise alone will likely bring more of the kind of “free” market that has already dismantled most of the healthcare system, where we now pay Medlife, and Regina Maria, and Sanador, and others for 15-30 minutes of expertise. We’re also grateful for it, because we’ve stopped believing the public sector would deliver that. No one expects care anymore, so the best we can do is pay for expertise.
This is what Nicușor struggles to understand, and it’s what is infuriating to many left of his center-right politics: he seems unaware of systemic injustices as well as the private companies’ role in perpetuating them, since failed services are making them rich.
Where I do break with some of Nicușor’s critics on the left is in their vitriol – after all, when care for the other is gone, it’s gone even from toolkit of those who ought to wield it best. Nicușor needs to be understood through the lens of his generation: he grew up believing in rules and systems, and in a universal liberal playbook, and kept up belief even as the liberal order began been crashing all around us. He probably still believes in the idea of the West as it was sold in the early 1990s in an “end of history” Eastern Europe: now we are all equal countries on the grand stage of the world and if we work hard, we’ll soar.
I’m sure this spoke to a former math-Olympian. I know it spoke to me as a child of the 1980s. It wasn’t a bad idea. But it hasn’t delivered. And it’s paved the way for the Orbans, Putins, and Trumps of the world. And now, for the Georgescus and Simions. The reasons why they are hard to defeat even though their discourse is hollow, is because the promises the Nicușors make sound a tad hollow, too. They’re not lies. But they don’t sound that different from what we’ve heard before: why would he be any different from those who’ve broken them in the past?
This is Nicușor’s context: we stopped believing promises. The Liberals (PNL) and the Social Democrats (PSD) embodied the utter failure of Romanian politics this election round. Its crude modus operandi for the past three decades is laid bare for all to see: stay in power, control enough access to resources to benefit directly, build just enough to earn another vote, overpromise and underdeliver, blame the others. So what if trains run late? Fuck it. Let each and every person figure it out by themselves. PNL and PSD’s last gasp measure for the past six months has been fearmongering. But in a social media driven world, where they don’t have the media monopoly they’ve been paying for with tens of millions of euros, they lost, and lose they will until they own up to their vacuousness.
“It's better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren”, the father tells the daughter in Octavia Butler’s beautiful and apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower. “If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust.”
*
“A principled ethic of democracy cannot be built on individualism alone, because that’s a contradiction in terms”, Bocai write in his Scena9 essay. “To share power with other citizens, you have to believe they’re not in your way – and that, at some fundamental level, they care for your well-being. You can’t, in the end, tell an entire population that the state must be rolled back, that everyone must learn to fend for themselves, and then be surprised there’s no one left to defend democracy. Defend it for what? For a society of selfishness?”
We live in that society of selfishness. It hurts to admit we are part of it and we enable it every day. I can pick on “self-care” and “boundary-speak” and all the rest of the therapeutic jargon employed to justify staying away from others, or from the work necessary to build for a greater good.
But let’s go somewhere where it hurts even more.
I don’t remember the last time a book made me feel as much shame as I did while reading Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, a book that has, at its core, a critique of our impassivity at the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. After a year and a half and numerous international organization calling Israel’s retaliation for the October 7 attacks genocide, nothing much has changed there.
The Monday after the Romanian elections, news broke that the Israeli state is actually planning to ramp up its campaign: push Gaza residents into a few camps, take over food aid (which it has been denying), and use face-recognition to determine who gets that aid. Private contractors would stand guard. The plan’s implementation is delayed at least until Trump visits the Middle East this week – the same Donald Trump who, a couple of months ago, shared a video envisioning Gaza as a future digital nomad haven, which could only happen once you’ve gotten rid of everyone who is in the way of beach front propriety. (“You’re talking about a million and a half people … we just clean out that whole thing”, Trump said in January).
What El Akkad’s writes about is our capacity to look away from suffering, a capacity that arguably we developed as we learned to focus on ourselves and our privileged lives. Yes, we look away also because we have our own problems to worry about, our own fears, our own decaying communities and democracies. But in Gaza, a child is killed every 45 minutes. The total number of children killed in the past 18 months stands close to 17.500 as I write this.
“A chasm has developed, these last few months, one of many but one that cannot be bridged”, El Akkad writes:
On one side is a portion of society that fears nothing more than the discontinuation of normalcy. That believes, regardless of what horror each new day brings, what matters most is to live as one had lived before, answering emails and meeting deadlines and maintaining productivity.
On the other is that portion which, having witnessed the horror, is simply unable to continue as before. How does one live, hearing the screams, bearing witness to the bodies? How does anything else matter?
Just pondering this question brings with it tremendous shame.
A couple of weeks ago, together with a few Romanian journalists we joined a vigil at the Perugia Journalism Festival for the more than 175 journalists killed in Gaza. That number is staggering – for context, 2024 was the deadliest year for journalists since the Committee to Protect Journalists has been gathering data; most were killed by the Israeli army.
Our standing on steps and holding the names of those killed was a small gesture; but even reading a story or a book on the topic counts. What El Akkad is pushing against is the idea that we can hang on to our feelings or moral righteousness while ignoring so much death and suffering, that we can – when elections come to Romania, for example – preach to others about not choosing “the lesser evil”.
“Of course the Republicans would be worse”, El Akkad writes, referencing the US elections. “What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyond which relative harm can no longer offset absolute evil. For a lot of people, genocide is that point.”
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In the Romanian context, Simion today could be absolute evil. There is plenty of evidence that if he wins, the Government collapses, we might redo the Parliamentary elections, and suddenly the theoretically powerless president gets to play a larger role in shaping the direction of Romania, and yes, it would be either be towards Hungarian illiberal democracy, or a DOGE-like dismantling of an already porous social safety net.
For some people, Nicușor, who is socially conservative, is relative harm. If they choose to sit this one out, or if for them this choice was harder than for you, don’t scold – maybe they’ve compromised enough of their convictions already. Maybe they’ve seen enough suffering elsewhere to look at this election as the Battle of the End Times.
Here is the complicated question I wrestle with – and one you ought to wrestle with, as well: If I am voting for Nicușor just so I can safely return to the seeming normalcy of a broken world, am I not morally bankrupt, too? If I vote for Nicușor just so the extreme right storm passes, but then I return to my routine of caring solely for myself, and not the world, how do I expect anything to change?
In a country as alienated as ours, there are no saviors. We need new ideas, new ideals, and we need to build for the world. We might even find the freedom we so desperately cherish in the process.
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Not the free of the “free market”, though. As Timothy Snyder writes in On Freedom, markets can’t be free – only humans can: “The free market only exists as a slogan covering senseless contradictions and justifying political bullying. There is no such thing as a free market in the world, nor can there be. Capitalism minus norms and laws is murderous conquest.”
I’ve been haunted by Snyder’s book in recent weeks. It’s a memoir, a travelogue, a history book, and a plea, all in one. Snyder is a historian of Eastern Europe, a champion of Ukraine, known for books like On Tyranny (he is the reason we’ve repeated “Do not obey in advance” obsessively in the past few years). His writing has long warned of democratic backsliding, and in a moment that echoes his own scholarship, he has left the US to live and teach in Toronto, Canada.
For Snyder, freedom isn’t negative – it’s not about breaking what exists. “[More often] we will need to create”, he writes. “Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value.”
In his book, Snyder lays out five conditions needed for freedom:
Sovereignty. You’re only free if you have the means to make real choices – and that includes the ability to see others as free, too. Sovereignty requires empathy, not just agency.
Unpredictability. Freedom means being able to act in ways no one can fully anticipate, outside of scripts written by power or algorithms.
Mobility. To be free, people must be able to move – across borders, classes, and opportunities – without artificial barriers holding them back.
Factuality. Without a shared commitment to truth, freedom collapses; lies serve those who want to control, not liberate.
Solidarity. Freedom depends on others being free; it’s sustained through mutual care, not isolation.
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Simion is not interested in any of these. You can’t have sovereignty if you engage in enemy creation. You can’t have unpredictability when you want to punish anyone that defies your norms. You can’t have mobility when you threatened those on the move. You can’t have factuality when you align yourself with people who say they hope journalists go extinct. And you can’t have solidarity when surrounded by colleagues dismissive and abusive of women.
At the same time, voting for Nicușor is not a guarantee of the freedom Snyder proposes. Even if he might in principle agree with this list, he is not alone. Some of his supporters have different definitions of freedom, and some would arguably perpetuate the world Bocai describes: one in which we choose a savior, thus dooming the project from the outset.
Vote Nicușor Dan not because he can save us, but precisely because he can’t, and shouldn’t. Do it so that we can have a conversation under his watch about what truly ails us. Loneliness. Fear. Disconnection. And why paying companies to solve these for us through consumption, self-development, prescription drugs, and entertainment is, ultimately, hollow.
The bad news, if you will, is that it’s not just the vote that is on us. It’s what we’ll do the next day, it’s about what we will we give our time to, and what will have our attention. If it’ll be more of the same, if Nicușor wins and we say “good job” then turn away, we’re pretty much just waiting out the climate apocalypse in our own bubbles.
If it won’t be more of the same, then it’s time to start asking ourselves seriously what our moral duty of repair is, and what we should be doing for others, too.
Butler published Parable of the Sower in the early 1990s. The story starts in 2024, with fires raging across California, people locking themselves in gated communities to defend from predators and zombie-like poor people, and a “Make America Great Again” president turning the country over to private companies to run water supplies, even company towns. Not yet the America of today, but eerily similar.
It’s the setting in which Lauren Olamina, a 17-yeard-old empath with a gift for preaching, decides to dream of reaching the stars – because you need to dream far outside of your current reality to bring people along. The book is made up of Lauren’s journal entries, and in one, written early, sometime at the end of April 2025, she struggles to find a way out of an inescapable fate: more fear, more catastrophe, more isolation, then death.
There has to be something more, she thinks to herself, even if that something is simply a different version of survival: in community, in building, in caring, in protecting. There is not yet a clear articulation of a better world, but there’s a few verses, almost a prayer, and she writes jots it down as a seed for the future.
All that you touch
you Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God is Change.
SIDE DISHES:
Let me pull out some of the recommendations above – hope they help with understanding this moment. Don’t forget last winter’s list, too.
On Trains Being Late. This is the essay that helped me think though some of what I wanted to say. It’s in Romanian, but you can Google Translate it – it’s worth every minute.
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad is devastating, as it should be.
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. I read sci-fi to escape the now, and see it from a different perspective. This book almost reads like a prophecy – one that I hope never comes to pass.
On Freedom, by Timothy Snyder. Let me quote a little more from it: “Freedom is not negative, not a matter of our breaking what is around us. Freedom is not us against the world but us within the world, knowing it and changing it.”
A geeky podcast with one of my favorite political thinkers, the Bulgarian Ivan Krastev. It mostly tackles America’s role in the new world order of today, but it has this gem about the difficulty of building a functional state today: “[The state] was based on the idea that it responded to and took care of human needs. But today, it must take care of human desires. And the most important thing is that while the market is taking care of your desires, the state cannot. Because I want the state to treat me as a very specific personality—but the state, in order to be fair, must treat me like everybody else. We’re no longer ready to live with that.”
This interview with the writer Ocean Vuong, trying to get at goodness, sincerity, and how they can be explored through writing.
niste argumente in plus :https://mihaidan.substack.com/p/romania-se-poate-schimba-dar-nu-cu?r=5a5l93