You Want Weird?
Presidential politics--that's weird.
As I discussed last time, I’m bewildered by the alacrity with which some supposedly independent-minded liberal intellectuals, when publicly discussing the 2024 election, have adopted the role formerly reserved for acid-grinning, sign-pumping attendees of national party conventions. I’ve come to accept the fact that galvanizing a maniacal degree of enthusiasm about a candidate is probably important to a candidate’s success (I’ve almost never felt such enthusiasm and have managed to vote anyway—just me). And it’s possible that amid the nightmarish crisis in American leadership signaled by the 2017-2021 presidency of a hectic, despotic lunatic, and given the critical importance of ensuring that the hectic, despotic lunatic doesn’t regain the presidency, it’s become necessary for a mass counter-hysteria to prevail in support of his opponent, even among people whose job supposedly involves critical thinking.
If that’s what’s happened to us, it’s yet another thing I damn Donald Trump and his party for fostering.
But I blame it on us, and I find it notable—not that Democratic party-regular types are perpetuating hyperbolic narratives about the presidential candidacy of Vice President Harris—but that so many others have not just firmly endorsed Harris’s candidacy, or expressed admiration for her, or argued in favor of her success and against Trump’s, but appointed themselves auxiliary party propagandists, seemingly pantingly eager to get to the mic and conjure dreams of a dazzling national transformation that, from the moment Harris became the presumptive nominee, has been ready to roll into our lives and renew and redeem our entire society and culture, in Millenarian fashion, on the back of this year’s presidential election.
This vaunted transformation has almost nothing to do with any claims regarding Harris’s legislative agenda. That agenda is soon to be revealed, causing debate about actual policy. I’ll be interested in that, and in the platform the party adopts at the convention, but the revival-meeting enthusiasts, operating on a loftier plane, find such matters quotidian at best.
The enthusiasm is for qualities and emotional experiences. While you might think qualities such as, say, not being Trump, and coming off vigorous, and even, who knows, potentially competent, might be enough to justify checking the qualities box (it is for me), the public-intellectual fanbase seems to want the current honeymoon period to go on forever. Which of course means staying policy-free. Because policy is something to argue about.
The quality most prized now seems to be joy.
And there may exist, for all I know, a politics of joy.
But whatever that thing may be, I’m pretty sure this can’t be it.
The thing that’s going on here is a very close, very hard-fought competition, to be conducted within the rigidly locked-in, at times seemingly decrepit two-party system of the United States of America, at a time when one party has tried to override the results of the previous election. Excitement, buzz, relief, hope for better things: sure. Having fun: good. Dems have been down-in-the-mouth to no good end for a long time. But supposedly serious people are building dreams of mass spiritual transformation, in a perpetually joyous present tense, on what is in fact just a presidential bid by an incumbent vice president, undertaken under bizarre and awkward circumstances caused by the health issues of the current president, with a by-no-means-zero chance of defeat by Donald Freaking Trump.
So we’re not even talking about the joy of struggle. There’s toughness in the joy of struggle, but this is another kind of joy. The word “vibes” doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The joy vibe has devolved on the choice of Governor Tim Walz as Harris’s running mate in ways that may be especially revealing, because Walz’s vibe, which really does jump off the screen, is normie, and it’s progressive, and that can make joy seem poised to sweep across a heartland that some of the upscale liberals who dominate the discourse don’t know much about and have been on the record fearing and loathing since 2016. I well recall those Facebook posts by intelligent people after Election Day saying things like “That’s it—now I’m never going to Ohio,” with replies like “Would you ever have gone to Ohio?”
They may not remember. I do. At times during the Trump administration it became permissible, at the very least, to express hope for the further immiseration of poor people living in counties where Trump won, and if Walz offers people who felt that way a shot at some kind of redemption, God bless him.
I think it’s fair to see in Walz—so far—a genuinely charismatic politician with some pragmatic and some aspirational tendencies that I, anyway, concur in. But some voters’ adoring him as the dad/grandpa they so desperately need, given their own dads’ and grandpas’ turn to Trumpism, as reported in The Independent and other organs, seems doomed to be short-lived and attended by unfair degrees of disappointment. “Cult of personality” is probably a necessary factor in democratic politics—and just having a personality, without being a grotesque, is nice to see in a politician. But there are matters of degree involved. I don’t think the degree to which some parts of the electorate have created Tim Walz out of their own crying personal needs is healthy for the people involved, for the campaign, or for the country.
You might even call it weird.
If you weren’t being nice.
Some other liberal democracies don’t let things get this weird. Addiction on the part of a major part of the U.S. public to the 24/7, perpetual-motion presidential contest, driven by media—there really is no cycle, the contest is always on, in one form or another, with everything always seeming to ride on it—is obstucted elsewhere by (gasp!) laws restricting campaigning. Here, the crisis in American democracy invested in Trump, and coinciding with a tidal wave of social media, has conspired to turn what was already a major cultural problem, I think deleterious to sanity in our politics, into what can look, to me anyway, like a form of public illness.
But rah-rah has always existed in partisan contests, and it has to, so what’s new? I don’t know. At some point I’m going to look into the history of sheer public adoration as a feature of electoral politics, but what’s creeping me out now has to do less with rah-rah than with rah-rah disguised as sophisticated analysis. That’s when rah-rah goes far beyond weird.
An example. Anand Giridharadas, a writer who talks a lot about the meaning behind events in U.S. politics, told an MSNBC interviewer, regarding Walz, “There is joy in what is coming, and I think he is going to teach lots of people, in addition to whatever role he plays in the election and in the White House.” By joy, Giridharadas means, for one thing, “having your boss,” if you’re a white man, “be a black woman.” He followed that idea up on Twitter, calling Walz “a PSA for white folks, older folks, men, rural dwellers, and others: You don’t need to be afraid of the future.”
The audience for this rallying cry isn’t, of course, that huge grab-bag of Americans Giridharadas is referring to, including “older folks” and “rural dwellers,” supposed victims of a fear of the future that has kept them from joining the march toward the beautiful world he predicts is coming. This “deplorables” comment with a cloying human face is meant for the MSNBC audience. It centers the ticket in a vision where, thanks to Tim Walz, those benighted people out there will at last be drawn into the joy of having, not a good boss, or no boss—certainly not being the boss, that’s not for these folks—but a boss who is a black woman.
They’ll finally get it. They’ll be happy.
If Giridharadas were pitching this notion straight at the “folks” he’s talking about, it would not, shall we say, help the campaign. Right-wing outlets have already jumped all over his self-parody of an elite so sophisticated that only it could have come up with such nonsense (an elite it pains me, deeply and personally, to have to call Brooklyn).
What’s most interesting, though, is the context. Giridharadas fills us in on the banal fact that authoritarian movements “make people feel things. They make people emotional. They get the blood up.” Walz then represents a welcome shift, because, says Giridharadas, “Democrats for too long have been running against authoritarianism with wonkiness, with policy, with material things, with bridges and roads.” Bridges and roads, material things in general, equate for him with wonkiness—with abstraction, coldness. No more of this leading with policy, he advises.
Which is funny, because well before 2016, on the planet where I live, I’ve seen Democrats at the presidential level running almost solely on what he’s calling emotional issues, which in policy terms have often ended up reflecting friendliness to bigger and bigger corporations—going high, being post-racial, inclusiveness, diversity, equity (not equality!), empathy, being compassionate, saving the country—and also freaking out with quite intense emotion, possibly well-justified, about assaults by the right on our fundamental institutions. We haven’t been lacking for emotion. And we've by no means failed to express it. The blood’s been up. That quality we have.
What we have yet to see is what the Harris campaign has to offer the public by way of this supposedly depressing “wonkiness.” Bridges? roads? jobs? wages? abortion rights? a health care system? support for labor organizing? for breaking up monopolies? Stuff a lot of people—I’m sorry, I mean folks—young, old, black, white, urban, rural, suburban, male, female, nonbinary—actually like? Care about? Having feelings about? Want?
Do these pundits know what emotion, outside propaganda, even is?
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Further Reading
The Independent on Walz as a public dad. Thom Hartmann takes the idea all the way.
You want weird? Check this Twitter account. It has “BREAKING” news on the greatness of Walz and pleads for RT’s. For example: “BREAKING: In a remarkably wholesome moment, Tim Walz asks Kamala Harris to take a selfie in front their sign in a classroom in Arizona. This tag team is incredible. Retweet so all Americans see this beautiful moment.” [emphasis added]
Politics has become our substitute for art. That's what explains the hoopla over presidential elections over and above the ostensible issues involved.
I think the portrayal of Kamala is delightful. You can see it as revealing her true character or you can see it as poking fun at the hoopla being made about her.