Failing upward is one of those modern era phrases you recognize, that translates right away, and yet is applied so casually that it doesn’t really mean what it’s meant to mean. So let us talk instead on the subject of success through failure in terms of … time travel? I guess?
The year is some year in the future. Let’s arbitrarily pick, oh I don’t know, 2028? Josh Stein is trying to move up in the Democrat party, maybe all the way to the Oval Office, if it’s still called that, and the ticket to that ticket is the “moderate” label. You can be pretty not moderate and still be billed as a moderate in the modern (D) pool, but there are some areas where they still pretend, especially “kitchen table” issues like affordability and safety. You don’t want to be a radical soft-on-crime guy in 2028, what with the War for the Planet of the Apes raging.
Lucky for Stein, he’s got an unlikely ally in the field. The 2026 North Carolina GOP, who saved his past self from future heartache on the topic with a well-placed and correct override of then-Governor Stein’s reprehensible decision to veto a bill requiring state and local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.
See it wasn’t an error on the part of the state’s Republicans, they did the right thing. But that’s the problem with retroactive campaigning: it often benefits from the past actions of those against it. We’ll call it “The Override Paradox.” This legislative defeat for past Stein was a gift for future Stein. A preemptive albatross removal, to further mix metaphors.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member