The Politics of Joy

 

The Democratic National Convention is over and done. Accepting her party's nomination, Kamala Harris hit a grand slam. It could hardly have been better. Or a greater celebration of American democracy at its glorious best.

Nor could there have been a greater contrast with the sorry spectacle a month ago in Milwaukee.

Who would have known a month or more ago that this was how it would be? Who would have known that, unburdened of what has been, the party would have been so united, so confident, so committed, so ready to fight the fight against MAGA darkness?

Kamala Harris and the Democrats in general had several obvious tasks - to introduce Kamala uniting her story with our American story, to explain and call out Trump's challenge to American freedom, national security, and international alliances, and to offer a vision of the future that is hopeful, patriotic, and strong in contrast to the other party's dark depressing weak and unpatriotic vision of American carnage. Not just Kamala's speech but the whole convention met the challenge to frame this campaign.

Unlike the personality cult convention in Milwaukee, the Democrats featured their former presidents and former candidates and their rising stars - AOC, Peter Buttigieg, Gretchen Whitmer, Hakeem Jeffries, and more.

But now comes the hard part, the campaign: Kamal for the People vs. Trump for himself, the party that loves and celebrates America vs. the party that denigrates America. That's a good frame for the campaign. But so divided and polarized is our country right now, thanks to nine years of MAGA darkness, this will be a very close election in which every vote counts, every voter counts.

Back To Chicago

Riding home from physical therapy on the crosstown bus the other day, I found myself humming Simon and Garfunkel's 1960s classic Sound of Silence - a great song, well worth humming anytime! Yet I had to wonder whether, somewhere in the recesses of my consciousness, the "Back to 1968" vibe increasingly associated with this week's Democratic convention may have had something to do with my humming that song so thoroughly associated with nostalgia for that tumultuous era.

As almost everyone who cares already knows, the Democrats are returning to Chicago for their convention this week. For all the reminders of and comparisons with 1968, the spell was actually already broken in 1996, the last time the Democrats convened in Chicago, the city which has actually hosted 26 national conventions, of which 1968 was something of an outlier, far from typical. That said, there are some noteworthy parallels between 1968 and 2024. Now as then, the sitting President has stepped aside in favor of the sitting Vice President, who has achieved the nomination without putting the country through the distortions caused by the now-routine primary process. Indeed, it was the unhappy 1968 experience which largely led to the institutionalization of the present primary process. Our accidental liberation from that ordeal this year could conceivably kindle a greater appreciation for the traditional convention system. although I suppose that's really just the political scientist in me talking! 

Of course, it would be a great thing to revitalize our diminished political parties, to increase the role of elected officials in choosing the party's nominee and diminish the role of ideological extremes and the power of money in choosing the party's nominee. We have just had a taste of how well that can work. But, again, that's probably just the political scientist in me talking! There is, sadly, little chance of it happening in reality!

Unlike 1968, however, the Democrats descend upon Chicago as a very unified party which is, as they say, in it to win it. Undoubtedly, there will be pro-Hamas protesters, making much more noise than their real numbers would warrant. The nominee has already answered them at a recent rally in Detroit, when she said "I'm speaking now." However obnoxious or embarrassing such protests may prove, they will be nothing like the protests that characterized the 1968 convention, which (while probably also representing less than a majority in the party and the country) really did represent a sizable minority, both in the party and in the country. Whatever their other divisions, Democrats today are largely united in their effort to save the country from anti-democratic authoritarianism and end the Trump threat. That represents a world of difference from the disastrously fractured party of 1968.

Tonight, President Biden gets to speak. I believe it was Harry Truman who was the first sitting president not seeking re-election to speak at his party's convention. That was in 1952. Then Eisenhower did it in 1960, Reagan in 1988,  Clinton in 2000, Obama in 2016. (Notably, LBJ did not attend, let alone address, the Democratic convention in 1968.) It is only right and proper to honor Biden tonight, to honor his long career of public service, to honor his historic accomplishment in ousting Trump in 2020, and to honor his legacy of presidential accomplishment, the most consequential presidency probably since LBJ's.

And then it will be time to turn the page and look to the future. Nostalgia has limited purchase in politics, particularly right now when the degree of disillusionment with politics-as-usual has reached such significant heights. The choice this year is between the particularly dystopian future symbolized by Project 2025 and an as yet incompletely articulated more hopeful future, which it will be the convention's task this week to present to the American people.

Weird, Weirder, Weirdest

There are lots of great things to say about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and why he will likely make a phenomenal running mate for Kamala Harris. In addition to all of that, however, he has the added distinction of apparently having popularized the weird meme as an all-purpose descriptor for the strange, dangerous, and wildly out-of-the-mainstream views being propounded particularly by his now opponent, GOP candidate JD Vance.

Vance is not the only candidate for the weirdness accolade, of course. For pure, unadulterated weirdness, there is, for example, the strange episode of RFK, Jr., and the bear cub, which has only recently come to light a decade after it all happened. Bobby and the Bear may well be the single weirdest candidate story this election year. But RFK, Jr.'s star-crossed campaign has never really been anything other than weird.

Vance, on the other hand, having journeyed from anti-Trump elite literary darling to total subservience to his party's Dear Leader and a voice for increasingly weird ultra-MAGA on-line malevolence, is a far more interestingly tragic case - as well as potentially more threatening to traditional constitutional and democratic governance. And, while Trump in many ways represents a somewhat post-religious extremism, Vance highlights the increasing significance of pseudo-religious anti-constitutional, anti-democratic extremism.

Which is not to say, of course, that problems like the contemporary obstacles to family formation are not important issues, worthy of serious attention. Rather, their invocation by weirdly out-of-the-mainstream integralist and integralist-adjacent ideologies and sheer personal malevolence just further forecloses the kind of rational deliberation and democratic debate such issues deserve.

JD Vance: Confused Convert

In the fallout from Donald Trump's strange pick of weirdly extreme JD Vance as his running mate, much has been made of Vance's "conversion" from bitter critic of Trump to slavish servant of his party's Dear Leader. But Vance is a convert in another, more traditional sense of the term as well. In 2019, Vance converted to Roman Catholicism and has been perceived as aligned with certain extreme currents in ultra-conservative Catholic thought. 

(The word Catholic, of course, means universal. The Catholic Church is a big tent, which incudes the widest spectrum of political stances - from far right to far left. No one should try to reduce faith - and anyone's personal conversion to faith - to merely political terms.)

That said, one cannot help but wonder how Vance will juggle some of the potentially contradictory confusions involved in his two conversions.

Speaking on Tucker Carlson's sow in 2021, when he was running for the Senate, Vance famously lamented that our country is run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” One of the supposed "cat ladies" he complained about wasVice President Kamala Harris.

Of course, Kamala Harris is a stepmother, parenting in blended families being a major reality in our contemporary society (as it in fact has been for much of human history, when lifespans were shorter and multiple marriages maybe even more common). Vance's curious comments insulted step-parents and adoptive parents and all the many couples who would like to be parents but have struggled with infertility. 

Beyond that, however, it shows a surprising confusion about one of the most distinctive institutional realities of the Church Vance has converted to. Unlike Protestantism, Roman Catholicism has long valued the vocations of those who forego marriage, indeed prohibiting marriage for most of its clergy and valorizing women and men who have chosen to live unmarried lives in religious communities. For much of its history, the Church - more than any other comparable social institution - offered women an honorable, active alternative to marriage and parenthood, in which women thrived spiritually, intellectually, and socially and have served as major cultural influencers. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with U.S. Catholic history is aware of the incomparable activity of women's religious communities in building the Church in this country - especially in such important fields as education and health care. It would be genuinely shocking for anyone who purports to articulate a Catholic worldview to be ignorant of that history or of the vast multitude of benefits that generations of Americans (both Catholic and non-Catholics) have experienced thanks to legions of dedicated unmarried religious women. 

A Phenomenal President

 

Joe Biden has graced our political life for decades, for most of my voting life. He was passed over for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, a decision which may have contributed as much as anything else to Donald Trump's election. But then in 2020 he returned to the fray and won the nomination and saved the country from a second Trump term. Since then, he has been by far the most effective and consequential president at least since LBJ, trying to heal the soul of America while accumulating real legislative accomplishments. His lifetime of experience has served him and America well in policy terms. But age, which is everyone's enemy, has taken its toll and prevented him from being an effective messenger in the apocalyptic conflict that faces our nation right now. 

Biden's first reaction apparently had been to stay the course, a natural reaction. If anything that is a good reminder that all of us, even our heroes, are human and respond to the resentments we have inevitably internalized. But the best of us, when pressed, are challenged to rise above such personal concerns and put country first - as Joe Biden has done once again. Joe Biden is ending his long and distinguished political career with an act of great patriotism, which will always honor his legacy. In this, Joe Biden has highlighted the gulf of difference in character between him and his opponent. And in managing this difficult bit necessary course correction, the Democrats are highlighting what it means to be a real political party - as opposed to a personality cult.

Can Kamala Harris (or anyone else) successfully prosecute the case for American democracy against Donald Trump? For all the arrogance (and distorted religion) on display at last week's convention in Milwaukee, Tump remains fundamentally unpopular. His ideas reman repugnant to most Americans. He can be beaten again.

As for Trump's running mate, he famously said in 2016, "I can't stomach Trump. I think that he's noxious and he is leading the white, working class to a really dark place."

“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance," said Utah Senator Mitt Romney to his biographer some time back. That pretty much says it all - about Vance, about the dispiriting performative display being enacted in Milwaukee, about the political party Romney once purportedly led. Running mates may sometimes add something to a ticket - representing or reaching out to this or that constituency. J.D. Vance does none of that. He represents a deliberate doubling down on Trump's narrow MAGA base.

The issues facing our country could not be more staark. Meanwhile, Joe Biden has given us a great example of how to be a great president - and how to leave the presidency with honor and dignity and grace.