Freedom

Vice President Harris released her first campaign ad for President, and it’s pretty spectacular. On his blog, Jason Kottke points out the emphasis on “Freedom” — not just the Beyoncé song (although that is absolutely an important part of it), but the ideal — and why it’s such a perfect message to kick off the campaign with.

Kottke quotes from an interview with Pete Buttigieg, pointing out how we’ve let Republicans corrupt the word “freedom” to push an authoritarian agenda, even though it’s actually progressive policies that make real freedom possible. That’s the kind of common-sense insight that made me a supporter of Buttigieg, and it seems especially common-sense insightful when you consider it was from 2018, before the pandemic.

That’s when we were shown repeatedly that the Republican Newspeak version of “freedom” just means “freedom from responsibility.” It’s not “conservative,” since genuinely conservative values assume some level of responsibility to society. It’s not even libertarian, since the idiots screaming “tyranny” at the prospect of wearing a mask or getting vaccinated also have unsurprisingly strong opinions about banning people from getting married or making their own reproductive decisions or receiving health care.

For what seems like my entire life, the Democratic party has met this challenge by treating the fall of American democracy as if they were a pair of enlightened parents trying to reason with a child having a screaming meltdown in the middle of a grocery store. That is, if the parents were also constantly haranguing the other shoppers to give them more money as the only way to make the screaming stop.

The Republicans have had their masks off — literally and figuratively — for a long time now, to the point where they’ve got people waving pre-printed signs reading “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” at the Republican National Convention, and the political media covering it talks about how the party is pivoting to a more mature and reasonable message of “unity.” The Democrats seem to have risen to the challenge by pointing out their obvious hypocrisy and then shrugging.

So the last couple of weeks have been bleak. Conventional wisdom said that a fundamentally decent man (with a bafflingly horrible and head-in-the-sand stance on one foreign policy/humanitarian issue) in the office of President, staying true to his promise of treating the job as a public servant, was doomed to lose the election. Democratic establishment — I’m assuming Schumer and Pelosi? — and a bunch of “elite donors” had decided to squeeze Biden out, and the New York Times and Washington Post joined the fight by devoting non-stop coverage to undermining the President. The stakes of this election were so high, they seemed to be saying, that why should we keep up the pretense that we’re obligated to represent the will of the people? Why not just drop the curtain and make it transparently obvious that we’re beholden only to super-wealthy liberals? Why not let a “Disney heiress” and George Clooney pitch in to remove the elected President and install a new one more to our liking?

The morning of Sunday, July 21st, I first read word that Biden planned to drop out of the 2024 Presidential race. I felt furious and completely defeated. Not only had they ruined any hope of preventing the disaster of another Trump administration, but they had destroyed any illusion that there was anybody left in federal politics who still believed in the most basic ideals of American civics. Even if they did somehow, impossibly, manage to stave off disaster for another election, it would be just the same cycle of barely hanging on until the next round of fundraising, forever. We need your $10 right now to save Democracy! No for real this time!

By the evening of Sunday, July 21st, I had done a complete reversal, feeling more energized and more optimistic than I had since the high point of Barack Obama’s first campaign. Is this what “hope” feels like?

The difference was the wave of endorsements for Kamala Harris led by Joe Biden, and then followed over and over and over again by one influential Democrat after another. And then a record-breaking number of individual donations to Harris’s new campaign. Everybody had been expecting — and I got the sense that the Times and the Post had been particularly looking forward to — more Democratic Party chaos, as they scrambled to pick their favorite candidate and make Harris jump through hoops to prove her worthiness. Instead, people overwhelmingly said “Nah. We’ll stick with the person who we explicitly voted to succeed Biden, thanks.”

I don’t know the “real” story, I probably never will, and I kind of hope I never do, because I like the apparent version too much. It sure as heck seems like Biden and Harris did everything exactly right: securing as many high-profile endorsements as they could, timing the announcement so that word of it couldn’t leak out in advance, and pulling off the whole transfer shockingly seamlessly, without giving the Democratic Party enough time to shoot themselves in the dick yet again. And significantly, it gave Biden the respect he was due, undoing all of the work the GOP and the media had been putting into “old and unfit” and flipping that into “lifelong public servant gracefully choosing to do what’s best for the country.”

(It is slightly unfortunate that “Freedom” by Beyoncé is a perfect choice for campaign song except that its most powerful line is “I’ma keep running cause a winner don’t quit on themselves,” which is a connotation I’m hoping will fade once the mistreatment of Biden is less fresh in everybody’s mind).

I especially like my most-likely-fictional mental image of Chuck Schumer sitting in his office, scowling like The Penguin from Batman 1966; and Nancy Pelosi with a forced smile dictating her effusive endorsement for Harris through clenched teeth. Not to mention the Times and Post gearing up for a long process of finding the nominee, complete with interactive charts and graphs showing endorsements, only to find that it had been settled by end of day Monday.

I’m so not used to seeing the Democratic Party be competent, I still don’t know what to think or how to be. But so far, the Harris campaign has been cranking out the hits. So much of it has the feeling of, “Wait, we’ve been able to do this the whole time?” We can have a President who’s not a Boomer? We’re allowed to call out bullshit when we see it? We can have campaign press releases acknowledge that Trump is an incoherent idiot and also bafflingly weird? We can admit that the “when they go low, we go high” approach wasn’t actually all that effective? And it in fact backfired into normalizing gutter trash people pissing all over the Constitution as if it were all just politics as usual?

I’m aware that I’m still in the honeymoon phase. Even if I’m confident now, I’ve got no doubt that the Democrats will find lots of clever new ways to disappoint us over the next five years. I’m sure that there has been considerable discussion about whether the country is ready for a black, south Asian, female President, instead of the more obvious question of whether the party is ready to acknowledge that it’s 2024 and shut the hell up with that nonsense. I’m sure there’s been no shortage of discussions about which middle-aged, straight, white man is the freshest and most exciting pick for vice president. I’m sure that there is considerable pearl-clutching going on as the campaign courts the youth vote by calling the GOP out on its bullshit, instead of making tortured references to Pokémon Go.

My somewhat-vague and probably-largely-fictional understanding of the current political situation has been driven entirely by reading political posts on social media and blogs, which I’ve been doing obsessively all week. And my biggest takeaway is that I hate reading that shit, and it’s been such a blessed relief to spend the last three years in relative calm, not convinced I have to stay constantly on top of what’s going on in federal politics. So if nothing else, I’m looking forward to “freedom from political blogs.”

But mostly, I’m just relieved that it feels like they’ve successfully rebooted the Democratic Party and gotten it to make sense again. It already feels like the Harris campaign has dropped the veil of nonsense and said, “You know it doesn’t have to be like this, right?” First take back the word freedom to mean what it’s supposed to mean, and then maybe we can do democracy, tolerance, inclusion, equality, diversity, unity, and woke.

In his most recent address, President Biden talked about the American ideal that we’ve never lived up to, but we’ve never walked away from. I’m really looking forward to ditching decades of dead weight that’s been dragging us down, and walking back towards that ideal.