The joy squad has rattled not only Team Trump but right-wing pundits as well. Even Fox News attack dog Jesse Watters, who has also been known to criticize Harris’s laugh, has voiced frustration about his own mother’s newfound infatuation with the vice president, insisting his mother is “a Kamala fanatic. Keeps talking about joy.”
Third, warmth breeds warmth. It’s called positive reinforcement. Projecting an air of positivity tends to make others (in this case: potential voters) feel positive themselves. And one can feel this energy in the big-time crowds, the spontaneous chants, and the sheer giddiness that has returned to the hustings.
Fourth, the nation has had fear fatigue for so long that the Dems’ campaign has brought waves of relief, hope, promise, and rejuvenated political engagement.
Eight years of MAGA gloom—with a global pandemic in the midst of it—had enveloped the country in a dark cloak. In 2016, Trump won the presidency by mining a deep vein of discontent among the electorate. He constantly spoke of grievance. He spread fear. He helped usher in a national mood of loathing: loathing of a so-called deep state, loathing of the establishment, and loathing of the Other. And he did it by fanning long-simmering resentments among his base—resentments that, at their roots, were often the result of legitimate concerns. Yet, at times, those resentments sprang from a kind of paranoid self-loathing embedded in the belief that the American Dream was somehow unavailable to a huge swath of American voters. From his inaugural address (“This American carnage stops right here”) to his January 6, 2021 call for insurrection (“Stop the steal!”) to four years of social media ranting at Joe Biden and the American judicial process on social media (“The legal system in our country has been corrupted & politicized at a level never seen before”), Trump figuratively polluted the American political atmosphere. When Biden initially handed the reins to Harris and voters responded so enthusiastically, they were evidently starving for a break from the drumbeat, seeking a more optimistic message, even if many may not have realized it at the time. They were primed for the positive.
The phrase “Make America Great Again” has always been about going backward. And in 2016, Trump deftly picked the electoral lock because we were at an anomalous hinge point in history when a slim majority of Americans were so afraid of what the future represented (technology, climate change, the global economy, shifts in migration), that they voted to get into a time machine. But this 248-year American experiment in representative democracy, for the most part, has been about progress, about embracing the future. And we may, in fact, be rerouting ourselves to that tried-and-true path of progress as we see raucous crowds roar in call-and-response cadence, when Harris declares at her rallies: “We’re not going back.”
While there will be battles royale during the next three months over ideology, policy, and personal biographies, I believe this election will fundamentally boil down to a contest between the future and the past, between joy and anger. Indeed, many experts are seeing a surge in young people joining the voter rolls and becoming engaged, offering their opinions, loud and clear. They will certainly play a decisive role in the outcome. The question in this race, at the end of day, will be whether people at the ballot box are inclined to happily embrace tomorrow or bitterly claw back to visions of yesterday.
Which is to say: What’s happening with the Harris-Walz campaign feels fresh and authentic—and different. It feels more like a movement than a moment. And Republican attacks about the ticket being “communist” or “socialist” just feel hackneyed. We’ve seen all of this before. And whatever we feel about politics, most of us are just exhausted by the old and desperate for something new.
As that respected political sage Stephen Stills once observed:
There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear…
Maybe it’s joy. And maybe that simple human feeling can change a nation’s future.
