Change vote, generation vote, future vote
Why I don't think Kamala is going to lose this high
Listening to somebody from IPSOS a couple of days back, I got the conventional wisdom (often right) that Harris is on an unsustainable high that, while it will extend through the convention next week, won’t last when the counter-punching truly begins.
I say, mebbe, mebbe not.
America has suffered numerous change elections going as far back as 2006, so, it’s definitely a harder time to be the incumbent — except the incumbent is gone and it’s hard (really hard) to look at Harris and say to yourself, same old, same old.
She ain’t the same and she ain’t nearly as old.
In fact, she’s another generation altogether — whatever the technicalities of parsing those groups.
Meanwhile, Old Man Trump is peddling this weird nostalgia (the twilight of White privilege — a cause I will not fight and die for), right down to his need to keep courting the Hannibal Lecter vote (is he not the scariest middle-aged White guy one can come up with?), which is truly odd and a bit sad, like when I trot our my tried-and-true Seinfeld references and get blank stares from everybody under 40. Evoking the 1990s didn’t work for Hillary, so I’m not quite sure why Donald thinks it works for him.
I guess the man knows what the man knows.
From a biographer of Trump:
The references to Lecter reveal something else about Trump: the era in which he rose to fame and his previous time as a celebrity. A Trump rally is a sort of time capsule, a frozen-in-amber moment from an earlier era — the 1980s — when Trump ruled the New York City clubs and tabloids and first graced the cover of Time magazine.
His self-curated rally playlists include hits like “Y.M.C.A.” (1978) and “Gloria” (1982). The fit of his suits and the length of his ties scream 1980s. He still has a penchant for gilded interior design. Trump Tower was completed in 1983.
Trump is the “crypt keeper for the 1980s,” which was “the high point of his life until he became president,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer who has criticized the former president.
“Every time he opens the door, people spill out from the 1980s, whether it’s Roger Stone or Rudy Giuliani, fashion from the ’80s spills out, whether it’s his monochrome tie or suits that invariably are made in two or three different colors … his office decor is still in the 1980s,” he said. “None of his tastes have been updated in decades.”
Trump’s Hannibal Lecter obsession fits perfectly in this mold. Thomas Harris’s novel “The Silence of the Lambs,” which the film is based on, hit bookstore shelves around the same time as Trump’s 1987 book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” (The New York Times had the two books side by side on its paperback bestseller list in mid-1989.)
That’s what Trump offers: steering by the rearview mirror into a lost but (for him) beloved past.
I get it. I met and fell for my future spouse (of 38 years now) back in the summer of 1982 (the Summer of Love [and great sci-fy movies] as far as I was concerned). When I’m unnerved or having a hard time falling asleep, that is where I go in my head — just like Roddy McDowal’s character of Huw Morgan in “How Green Was My Valley”:
There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth.
Oh, lovely it was.
I pretty much lived in that book and a few others like it during my first-born’s long fight with cancer in the mid-1990s, being so moved by their conjuring of a beautiful simple past into which I then sought to retreat — depressed I was by the present and a feared future — that I wrote my own version:
Oh, and you know I go there now and again still today — that strange black-and-white world in which I was a hero, along with my spouse and my daughter, in a great and frightening tale.
[Emily, now 32, is happily married to a wonderful woman and living with a menagerie of pets, to include one Siberian cat. She earned her present and deserves her future — along with her vote, mister Vance!]
The past is a great place in which to seek out repair.
It’s just no place for growth.
As I argue in America’s New Map:
In yearning for an irretrievable past, nostalgia is a lie concocted by our younger minds and sold to our present selves. An internal dialogue of grief, it is the death of strategic vision.
When politically weaponized, nostalgia ruins our appreciation of the present and deadens our anticipation of the future. It reduces leadership to steering by the rearview mirror. As an animating ideology, nostalgia is a rallying point for culture warriors determined to roll back time—the knee-jerk response of religious fundamentalists across the world to globalization’s liberating dynamics.
In economic terms, nostalgia often profiteers on prejudice by idealizing yesterday’s less-equal society. It narrows ambition and suffocates innovation by idealizing a simpler—but always more patriarchal and constricted—past to which return is impossible without re-subjugating those who have since achieved agency, thus disparaging their contributions (What have they ever done?) while discounting their consumer demand (Why must I serve those people?).
Worst, in its rosy memorializing of the “good old days,” nostalgia is social escapism bordering on emotional disorder. It is unhealthy and un-American.
I truly believe that you can’t go home again — whatever that past may be. You either move forward and through, or you stagnate, which is just waiting for death and toying with nihilism in the meantime.
So, no, I don’t agree with the IPSOS fellow: I think Harris’ high is going to extend right through to the election, and I base that subjective analysis solely on how Biden’s decision made me feel: relieved like a huge weight was taken off my chest.
I can only compare it to that weird post-anesthesia high you experience when you awake in the post-surgery recovery room (after what seems like 2-3 seconds of being out): It’s over! I survived! I’m moving on!
Honestly, it’s like the angels moved the boulder and I got up and walked out, open-wounds and all. I am risen!
That is such a powerful emotion, and yeah, it beats fear. It really does.
Instead of dread about what needs to be done, you just have this feeling that I’m still in this game, and I can still win!
I know it’s safer to always bet on disaster and retreat. Hell, I am very Irish! I see trouble around every corner. It’s an occupational hazard. But that’s why I’m likewise so attracted to optimism — the whole this-thing-is-going-to-work-out bit.
Don’t tell me the odds!
Harris is signaling that, Trump is not. He’s just screeching about how rickety and ready-to-collapse that bridge to tomorrow is.
Me? I want someone with a clear sense of the other side — not recalling the past but giving me a happy ending to what we now endure.
You can’t reach that conclusion by doubling back to the start of the movie/novel. At best, you can skip ahead as fast as you dare to the last pages, which I sought to provide in my book.
And then you need to imagine and project something truly better, truly evolved, truly in line with the obstacles and evolutions we now face.
People want to be part of something, and the best way to do that is to get them involved in building it — the easiest type of future to predict.
I don’t want to try and recapture the Donald’s youth. It wasn’t better than today, and it’s no substitute for an improved tomorrow.
Keeping him out of jail is also a non-starter for me. Eventually, his long train of bankruptcies (financial, moral) must be accounted for. The White House deserves better and so does our country.
This is why Harris is picking up the “double haters”:
“Taking Biden out of the mix and replacing him with Harris has significantly altered a key metric in this race. As we [The Hill] reported last month, Trump-Biden double haters want to shake things up, but they are wary of change that is too authoritarian. Harris appears to provide most of this group with the fresh outlook they desire,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, in the poll report.
The poll also showed a jump in voter enthusiasm for the presidential contest with Harris in the race, especially among Democrats. Voter enthusiasm jumped from 48 percent in June for a Trump-Biden rematch to 68 percent in July with a match-up between Trump and Harris, according to the poll.
“Fresh” and “desire” are two great words to have your campaign associated with — not “dread” and “anger.” Per a sharp bit of WAPO analysis on Harris working the generational divide while Trump works the cultural divide:
Trump’s grievance-fueled movement is full of nostalgia for past generations and his own term in office — and fear and anger about how undocumented immigration and secularization are changing the country, interviews with many supporters show. At rallies, Trump offers apocalyptic warnings about the southern border, promises to crack down on “transgender insanity,” re-litigates his 2020 election loss, belittles his critics and vows retribution on his perceived enemies, making many false and baseless claims in his lengthy speeches.
Hectoring, lecturing, scaring versus …
Harris, meanwhile, is drawing new energy from young voters and people of color who say they worry that Trump will take America backward to a place where women, people of color, LGBTQ+ Americans and others face more challenges. She delivers tightly scripted speeches that prompt her crowds to boo at Trump but that also strike sunny tones, such as pointing toward “the future.”
Point away, Kamala.
Earlier in the campaign, voters struggled to connect Biden with the future, according to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who worked on the Biden campaign and supports Harris. Younger voters would say that Trump and Biden both represented the past.
“Now, people clearly see Harris as change — demographically, stylistically, culturally, age, gender, just in every way,” Lake said.
This will be yet another change election, which the Dems have cleverly engineered by replacing Biden with Harris in the most democratic impulse I’ve ever seen: a strong majority of us said “no,” and Biden and the party listened and responded — on a dime.
Cue the uplifting montage music!
Harris was born in the 1960s on the cusp of Gen X, and her campaign has leaned into the jokes and references of Gen Z. When singer Charli XCX declared the day that Biden dropped out that “kamala IS brat” — delighting TikTok users and baffling the older and less-online — Harris’s team immediately embraced the term, which has come to mean something like messy but bold. The campaign began to use the font and Shrek green of Charli XCX’s album cover.
JFK sold himself as the first president to be born in the 20th century. Now Harris mines similar territory by default: she’d be the first post-JFK president.
And man, do we need somebody to de-vilify the US Government, like Lincoln did, like TR did, like FDR did, like JFK did. We need somebody who uplifts us and makes us want to try harder versus stockpiling weapons and canned goods — opting out … out of fear for the future.
The contrast couldn’t be sharper: Trump blasts hits from the late 1970s and early 1980s, while Harris works Charli HCX and Megan Thee Stallion and Beyonce and … wait for it … Taylor Swift.
Not going back, indeed.
I still yearn to be heroic — something that doesn’t involve me crouching in my basement, looking out my shoot holes for zombies to kill.
I want something better. I want something to build.
Don’t you?
Good one, Thomas. "revivify", perhaps