I don’t normally attend or watch political rallies, preferring to read about them afterwards in articles produced by political analysts. But I decided this morning to take in at least part of the Harris/Walz rally speech in Philadelphia.
I’m glad I did, for a number of reasons. Not because I learned anything new about the ticket’s policy stance, but because I saw something that’s been missing heretofore in this election cycle.
Hope. Hope that it’s still possible to build a better future, for everyone, if only we work together.
It’s remarkable, on a personal level, that I hadn’t noticed this lack. A fundamental reason I am a Democrat rather than a Republican1 is precisely because, in the modern era, it’s the Democrats who are trying to build a decent future for everyone. The Republicans are intensely focused on not only preserving the past but dragging us back into it, whether we all want to go there or not.
Hope for the future being missing from the political debate this cycle is interesting (not to mention disturbing). It’s an example, I think, of an oddball limitation of the human psyche2: our thinking tends to get trapped by the thinking of others when we engage in debate, particularly intense debate. Put another way, the universe of discourse gets defined, in part, by the specific concepts that are under discussion…which is, to borrow Tim Walz’ signature phrase, weird. The universe of discourse really is, uhh, the entire universe3.
This is a particularly big issue in politics because politics, in a representative democracy, is about deciding what future we want to live in. You can really lead yourself astray when you forget that literally anything is possible, given enough time and attention4.
Kudos to Harris and Walz for reminding us of this. In doing so they are taking advantage of a fundamental limitation of the conservative political worldview, namely, that its focus on preserving the past prunes away a lot of possible futures, many of which most people would agree are far better than what we have today.
I was also impressed with the way in which Harris delivered her speech (I hadn’t heard her speak before). For one thing, she, like Obama (although to a lesser extent), has that particular cadence I associate with powerful motivational leaders5. It’s an interesting combination of cadence and word choice that balances soaring rhetoric with down-to-earth accessibility.
The other thing I noticed about Harris — which will no doubt horrify my liberal, progressive friends — is that the way she delivers her vision for the future sounds a lot like Ronald Reagan. Who also ran against someone who was (perhaps unfairly) seen as having too negative outlook on the world as it existed6. Granted, talking about the ills of today is both an important and necessary part of politics. You can’t solve a problem you’re ignoring. But it can’t be the totality of the discussion.
Political problems are always related to personal grievances. Trump is a master of building political power based on grievances, real or imagined. But, Trump being Trump, almost all of his campaign focuses on pounding just that one grievance key. With only occasional off-handed, vague assertions about how great things will be once he’s back in office7. But in doing so he’s bound the Republican ticket to an essentially negative view of the world.
When Biden stepped aside, Harris and Walz were able to re-introduce hope into the Presidential campaign, breaking the shackles that Trump’s approach created. As Reagan demonstrated, that has the potential to be a very powerful message, because people don’t want to just hear about how bad things are. They want to know how things can be made better.
The primary reason I support the Harris/Walz campaign is because it is focused on creating a better future for all. Including those among us whose blinders keep them from seeing all the futures they could enjoy, and in which they would be better off, too.
I hope you’ll join me and do what you can — donate money and/or time, educate voters unclear on the importance of this election, help turn out voters, whatever — to secure Harris’ victory in November.
Hankering for the past, even the one that actually existed, is philosophically flawed because, unless you own a time machine, you can’t get there. We need to learn from the past, not recreate it. All we ever have the power to do is build the future. But that’s enough, if we keep hope alive.
I used to be a member of the GOP. I left them years ago when I realized (a) I hadn’t voted for a Republican candidate for years, (b) most of their Presidential wannabees in 2000 were hesitant and afraid to admit they “believed” in evolution, and (c) they weren’t fulfilling what I view as a critical role of government, namely, being the guardian of the future. ↩
They exist, you know. Do you know of any complex system that doesn’t have bugs and gotchas? I sure don’t! ↩
None of us is smart enough to analyze a problem when we try to include all its connections to the entire universe. Of necessity we apply the pruning shears of abstraction. In doing so we all too often forget that we have pruned the “universe” back…so the results we come up with from our analysis may not actually map too well to the real world. Or include all the possibilities that are, in reality, available. Reductio ad absurdum lurks everywhere. ↩
I know that’s not a completely true statement. There are, after all, natural laws — hello, physics! — but within that portion of the universe where political decisions are made, it definitely is true. And, hey, in many ways natural laws generally limit how you can accomplish things, not whether or not you can accomplish them. It may not be possible to travel faster than light (damn!), but you can still go to the stars if you’re willing to spend the money and take the time. ↩
I used to remark during his Presidency that there were “two Obamas”. One was President Obama, and spoke as a highly intelligent person whom I would not want to piss off. The other was Preacher Obama, who spoke in a way that helped me believe we could do the impossible by working together. It’s a rare repertoire. ↩
Remember the whole “malaise” thing? ↩
Which ideas are usually either not based in reality or would cause massive problems for many people if they were actually implemented ↩
