The Witness Chronicles, July 29, 2024
What a difference a week makes
Just Like That, a Breath of Fresh Air Clears Out the Gloom
There is a huge sense of relief out there
Here in Western NY, we are having a typical hot muggy summer, though not as hot as a lot of the country, thank God. But I was up at six this morning, and though it was cool outside, my apartment was humid and stuffy, so I turned on the AC for a few minutes to clear out the moist air.
And in a few minutes the job was done and the AC was off, for now. And this metaphor was so obvious to me that I sat for a few minutes just thinking about the last week, a remarkable one in American politics.
Last night, in her newsletter, Letters From An American, historian Heather Cox Richardson neatly summarized how events in US politics have a history of changing like this, slowly and then all at once. It’s a good read for those of us looking over our shoulders at the Republican horde in the distance.
In my air conditioning metaphor, I reserved the idea that I will be turning to it to cool things down when they inevitably heat up again. That’s just being realistic. But I also want to just enjoy seeing a good portion of our country realizing we are not inevitably marching down a dark road to disaster.
The Kamala blast of fresh air feels real and it has unleashed a pent up need for a little joy in American politics, after an unrelenting onslaught of negativity from Trump and the extreme right. And now we see them scrambling to respond to these changes, but they have a huge problem and it comes directly from Mr. Trump himself.
They literally have no positive story to tell. After years of telling all of us we live in a hellhole and hordes of evil, insane immigrant criminals are everywhere, they can’t shift gears. Instead they are cycling through a series of lies, silly insults, misogynist hate, and the division that has characterized everything in Trump’s political life.
At this point they know nothing else and their deluge of negativity has kept them from developing any kind of policy, political accomplishment, or unity they can fall back on as the fear campaign fizzles.
This is the problem with hate as a political tool. You cannot defeat hate with more hate, and Kamala Harris seems to know this. That ubiquitous laugh and smile that Trump tries so desperately to mock, has power and we are watching it in action, changing the air in the room.
And he is watching it too and doing the only thing he knows, doubling down on his tired message of gloom and doom. It has gone from being truly alarming to sounding tired and old, in just a few days, just as he has gone from scary to simply a pitiful old man crying about change.
For a moment, after the shock of missing death by a fraction of an inch, we saw Donald Trump seeming humbled and talking about unity, but he simply cannot change. I measure this national political shift back to his acceptance speech at the Republican nominating convention where he briefly tried the unity thing and then fell into a seemingly endless rant about how horrible everything is.
All this before President Joe Biden did the right thing and passed the reins to Kamala Harris, shocking the right and revitalizing the rest of us. What a moment.
But history may measure this downfall, if it is that, by the events that culminated in that convention. The trials and convictions, the shooting by a disaffected young man who seems to have been planning to shoot someone famous, regardless of party, and then the sudden choice of J.D. Vance as running mate, a man who has turned out to be a huge liability and doesn’t seem to know it.
The building may have been smoldering even before Biden’s choice fanned the flames of its destruction.
And now a cautionary note. This is not over yet, it is going to get even uglier, if that is possible, and Trump is now surrounded by an organized army of ideologs, well financed and dedicated to ending democracy by any means possible.
The next 100 days, and the months that follow the election, will be a political war, but now we are armed and ready with a message and leader the right cannot figure out how to stop, though they will try. They openly plan to not accept any election results that don’t have Trump winning and they have packed the courts that could protect the Constitution.
We are going to have to hang tough. But there are signs of division within the Republican Party with some doubling down on racial hate as a weapon and others begging them to turn down that rhetoric, knowing it is chasing away voters they desperately need.
This contrast is startling in its clarity and clarity and unity is exactly what the Democratic response has needed. Now we appear to have it and we must stay unified and strong for the next months of change.
The past week should show us we can do this, we can literally save our democracy, but there is a lot of work to be done.
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