The Joy

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan at Crooks & Liars for sharing this article at Mike's Blog Round-Up! Hope everyone enjoyed the DNC this week, hope you've ordered your BALLZ TO THE WALZ t-shirts like I have, and get the damn vote out for every Democratic candidate across all 50 states! Let's EFFING GOOOOO....

There is a thrill to the Democratic Party campaign I haven't seen in ages.

The current national convention in Chicago is humming with delight, musicians showing up to perform during otherwise staid roll calls, genuine laughs and cheers from audiences not just sitting there applauding politely on cue. For all of the discontent from the media elites, and for the legitimate criticisms from protestors outside that the party is ignoring the suffering in Gaza, and for all the dread about another trump attempt to hijack the elections; the Democratic voting base is enjoying the moment with the kind of hope for the future not seen since Obama's victorious celebration in Grant Park when he won in 2008.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon is documenting the atrocities sorry bad habit, documenting the pleasantries:

Organizers kicked off the Democratic National Convention by immediately demonstrating that they know how to throw a party better than Republicans. Democrats scheduled their elderly leader who rambles on too long for the first night, not the last. President Joe Biden's Monday night speech started slow and only got more boring, but the crowd cheered him gamely, chanting, "Thank you, Joe!" Part of that was real gratitude for the surprisingly effective job he's done in his four years in office. But the cheers reflected the attendees' joy at knowing this whole thing is done with. It's time to move forward with a candidate who embodies their hopes for the future...

That word matters.

In contrast, Donald Trump's capstone speech at the Republican National Convention was disastrous. Biden may have been long-winded and boring, but Trump was all those things while also sounding objectively weird. His speech ping-ponged between self-pity and incoherence, delivered in that odd sing-song quiet voice he uses when his aides tell him to act "serious." The crowd, always eager to flatter the cult leader's ego, cheered, but it felt forced and exhausted...

It's odd how the RNC was barely a month ago, and yet is utterly forgettable now. The only detail I can recall from it was how a number of attendees band-aided their ear in honor of trump's surviving that assassination attempt the week before... an event that has already dropped off of most people's awareness and something that failed to generate any level of sympathy or concern outside of the MAGA base.

As Andrew O'Hehir wrote about the RNC last month, the convention was "a startlingly quiet, polite, low-energy event." We did witness the audience get hyped up for Hulk Hogan, but even that has caveats: It was the last night, so more people bothered to show up. Hogan is a professional wrestler, an expert at riling up crowds over nonsense. (Though the actual message of his speech was terrifying and fascistic.) And frankly, after four days of listlessly wandering around hoping something interesting might happen, the attendees seemed eager to feel something. But Trump destroyed Hogan's hard work with his whining, droning, weird speech. 

On Tuesday night, Harris made the contrast crystal clear by holding a rally at the Fiserv Forum, where the RNC was held. (Personal insert: Milwaukee is literally up the road from Chicago, so Harris traveling to Fiserv wasn't a burden) It speaks volumes about the enthusiasm gap that it's not even surprising that the turnout and volume at this Harris rally outdid what Trump got at his own convention last month.

The difference was dramatic enough that Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, appeared at the DNC by remote video from Milwaukee. It created the visual effect of more than doubling what Trump was able to turn, despite covering his ear with a comically oversized bandage and everything...

One of the things about long political campaigns is the belief in Momentum (the Big Mo as Bush the Elder called it), and if the differences between the party conventions are any evidence, all of the Big Mo is with Kamala:

With Harris as the nominee, however, you can feel Democratic voters unclenching. This is not a crowd that feels "triggered." The mood is giddy. There's a scent of hope in the air. There's plenty of criticism of Trump, but it's no longer coming from a place of cornered animals trying to survive. The tone towards that babbling old fascist is one of contempt. Instead of flinching, Democrats are laughing in Trump's face. No wonder he's even more obsessed with crowd sizes and ratings than usual. He used to be the one offering entertainment value, even if it was only to his base that just wanted to inflict pain on their perceived enemies. Now it's Harris who is captivating, this time to a nation that wants to feel something other than despair...

I can speak to the enthusiasm among the political circles I keep: both the TNC Horde and the Balloon Juice commentariat are bouncing off the walls like it's a romper room. Hell, even the Rude Pundit is giddy:

It was simple. I thought, "Man, we need this." And by "this," I mean all the joy and energy and possibility being embodied on that stage. But it's not only about this moment. We need this because the one thing that's been missing as we emerged from the worst part of the Covid pandemic (and recognizing that Covid is still very much a problem) is a catharsis, some release where we all recognize that we survived. And it's not just a catharsis for getting through the lockdowns and mass deaths and required health safety measures. It's a catharsis for surviving the presidency of Donald Trump, which took this country down some incredibly dark alleys, leaving it battered and weary, with a good deal of PTSD.

We couldn't actually celebrate, or even fully exhale, because hanging over all of us was the tension of what would bring the Trump saga to its end. We waited for something to validate the anger we had and to demonstrate that things would be different. We hoped that Trump would be convicted and sent to prison, but that didn't happen and may not. 

The election of Joe Biden was an absolutely necessary step to get to this point. We needed someone who knew how the federal government worked inside and out, an old hand to get to the bridge and right the ship, weld the holes, scrub off the rust, get rid of the piles of garbage, and get us back on course, all while restocking the bar. We were all scared out of our weary minds in 2020, awaiting the even deadlier next surge of Covid deaths that was coming in January 2021. Then January 6th happened, and our sense of security in the very things that are supposed to function in this country were undermined, all while watching a large percentage of the population go down a red-capped abyss of crazy and conspiracies they will likely never return from. Biden's skill was in allowing the rest of us to chill out, to see that the government hadn't lost the ability to actually work.

In the last few months, though, everything kept hitting us, even as Trump was found guilty or liable, owing hundreds of millions of dollars. All of it still didn't lead us to anything like a feeling of completion, a feeling we could, indeed, move on. We were hit again and again with insane Supreme Court decisions, with the polls that showed Biden losing, with Biden's obvious signs of aging, with this feeling that it was all going to go south again. We would stick by Biden if we had to (and more than a few were doing so gladly), but, my god, we needed celebration. We needed joy. Real joy, not the kind of joy that says, "We made it," but the joy that says, "We crushed it." We need to face our American demons, who are easily identifiable, and we need to unify to exorcise them and send them back to whatever crevices in the earth they crawled out of, not just defeat them at the polls...

A previous Democratic leader once clarified that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but FDR spoke to the rational demands of the moment and to the urgency of recovering from the Great Depression. The demands and urgency we face today have more to do with recovering from the emotional traumas of things like 9/11, the failed War on Terror, the economic chaos threatened by Silicon Valley "disruptors" looking to profit from fanciful shell games, the overwhelming Culture War madness of misogynists looking to take rights away from women and of racists looking to take rights away from ethnics they deemed "Other".

The opposite emotion to Fear in many ways is Joy, a means to build well-being for the self, the delight of the new and the willingness to celebrate. In the face of Republican Fearmongering, it has been a long time since Democrats fought back using Joy not as a shield but as a weapon, cutting through the dour unhappiness of the likes of trump and JD Vance who scowl at their rallies and lie about how America is "doomed" unless they take over as our overlords.

The Democrats are campaigning this year on Joy, not as a slogan but as an emotional buttress, a foundation on which all other policy positions will rest, allowing the nation to build not only on the successes of Biden's administration but on the future of Harris' potential tenure.

This is a campaign movement of Joy that can thrive, that can inspire millions to turn out to vote, with every sign this post-convention that the Democratic ground game will run with this emotion all the way to victory in 2024.

...

Just remember to keep the lawyers on payroll to stop trump and his Republican lackeys from the electoral chaos they're planning to unleash, please and thank you.