THE DEMOCRATS RECLAIM FIVE IMPORTANT WORDS AND BELIEFS

Anand Ghiridharadas once again presents a thought provoking analysis worth cross-posting:

The five words Democrats are reclaiming

Kamala Harris choosing Tim Walz as her running mate struck me as unusually momentous from the moment it was announced. In the intervening weeks, the effects of this selection have felt as much cultural as electoral. But it wasn’t until I watched the hunter-coach-soldier-father-teacher speak last night that I made sense of it.

He is cementing the Democrats’ reclamation of five vital words.

Freedom. Patriotism. Family. Masculinity. Normalcy.

In my lifetime, these words have largely belonged to the right. Now, this ownership wasn’t deserved. On the contrary, so much of what the right actually stood for undermined these concepts it claimed so ardently and successfully.

It thwarted the freedom to vote and get an abortion and breathe clean air. It tarnished America’s standing in the world with fraudulent wars and the undermining of global institutions. It made it harder to tend to families — let alone plan for one — with its cruel and extreme policies. It undermined men’s sense of themselves with bad trade deals and nonexistent adjustment assistance. It was a movement that thrived on turning once-regular people into cruel and conspiracy-addled relatives and neighbors and friends, pumping them full of fake fears.

And yet its claims to these words persisted, assisted — if we are honest — by a lack of skill and will on the left at laying a counterclaim.

Attempts were made. Barack Obama preached an only-in-America-is-my-story-even-possible vision of patriotism. Pete Buttigieg spoke of reclaiming freedom. Guys like The Rock showcased a vigorous but loving form of masculinity. A wave of women leaders nationwide gave moving speeches about reproductive rights as central to family values, not antithetical to them.

But it hasn’t quite congealed the way it did this week. My sense of the meaning of the 2024 Democratic National Convention is that, at long last, these five vital words have officially been reclaimed.

Freedom. Patriotism. Family. Masculinity. Normalcy.

This reclamation is, first and foremost, the doing of Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign. These are themes she embraces, and they are threaded throughout every speech and banner at the DNC. And it is being dramatically reinforced and reinvigorated by Harris’s selection of Tim Walz, whose credibility stems as much from what he represents as what he’s accomplished.

When Walz talks about freedom, he does so as a man who looks like him is especially well-positioned to do. The right has been waging a decades-long identity war, trying to persuade white people and men and rural people and older people and others that their very way of life is under violent assault. And it is all the more powerful to have someone who incarnates what they are targeting stand up and say, “No.” And who further says with a beaming smile, “We’re going to be OK. Would you like some of the apple I just sliced up?”

Walz is the picture of a man stirred up to be jealous of his liberties, wary of a government coming to take them away. And he is! He is wary of the government, as he says, coming into your medical exam room to make decisions for you. He speaks with passion about keeping the government out of our bedrooms. He frames freedom as leaving other people alone and having the right to be left alone, following what he calls the golden rule of minding your own damn business. This is shrewd political work from an apparently folksy man, reclaiming a stolen word and giving it a common-sense aura, and updating it for the multiracial democracy that we are becoming, telling people that a diverse society endures by letting people who are different live and let live.

It’s much the same when he speaks of patriotism. “We’re all here tonight for a beautiful, simple reason. We love this country,” he said last night. And it’s not just him. One of the defining features of this 2024 DNC was the Democrats finally, finally embracing patriotism, without an iota of embarrassment. Earnest chants of U-S-A broke out throughout the week, except that it was not people bloodthirsty to invade some foreign country but people determined to usher in a society that serves all. Patriotism has eluded the left, for a host of reasons, not least people wrongly thinking it is cringe to profess love of country or somehow the same as nationalism. (It’s not. Look it up.) Harris has encouraged this taking back of patriotism with her repeated and effective lines about loving the country and working relentlessly to perfect it.

And family. My god. Last night, as Walz spoke and paid tribute to his daughter and son and wife, referring to them as his entire world, and his son, Gus, stood up, overcome with feeling, and pointed fervently at him and yelled, “That’s my dad!” — well, it just felt so reassuring to see a family so normal, so unremarkable, that actually, you know, loves each other. President Biden’s love of his family, a family that has been through hell, is notable, too. Harris’s story of her blended family, and her husband’s ex-wife bothering to tell the media what a great figure Harris is in their family, only strengthens the sense that these are solid family people, up against a movement that is waging an attack on a family’s right to plan, demeaning people who don’t have children but do have cats, scheming to unravel millions of people’s marriages by revoking constitutional protections. The right will still try, but it was hard to watch this year’s DNC and think, These people don’t believe in the institution of family!

Where Walz personally shines brightest is in his powerful reframing of masculinity. I’ve been hearing people call his version “tonic masculinity,” in contrast to the toxic kind. In politics, it is not enough to be against, and in recent years progressive forces have been better at articulating what needs to change about masculinity, what needs to be purged and banished and, yes, locked up, than what needs to be born. Meanwhile, Walz stands as a living counterpoint to the backlash masculinity of Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and others. Core elements of his life — the military, hunting, coaching football, midwestern roots — make it harder to dismiss him as an effete coastal elite coming for your traditional way of life. Bringing out his old football team was a particularly inspired flourish. Images matter in politics. Here was a bunch of middle-aged white guys — a demographic that Democrats struggle with — applauding their coach-turned-vice presidential nominee. This, too, is being a man: standing up to bullies, standing up for others, not being afraid of a future where women and people of color also have say and power.

And yesterday Walz only used his signature word, “weird,” once. But it is he who put that word on the map as a way to frame American fascism in 2024. It spread across the left and fueled debate and possibly got him selected. And that label, applied to right, implies an opposite one. Democrats, who have allowed themselves for too long to be dismissed as fringey or out of touch with regular people or interested in niche causes or identity politics issues that didn’t have broad support, were reclaiming normalcy itself. Of the right’s vision, Walz said last night, “It’s an agenda nobody asked for.”

Freedom. Patriotism. Family. Masculinity. Normalcy.

These reclaimings are, I think, the deep story of this entire convention, made manifest in the life and self-presentation of Governor Walz — and I am sure they will be at the heart of Harris’s acceptance speech tonight.

None of this is without risk, however. A party that increasingly cloaks itself in language of this kind can risk becoming hostile to those who raise legitimate challenges to the country’s idea of itself, who strain the current imagination of normal, who do not feel loved by America.

In recent hours, there has been a great deal of drama and pain around the convention, involving whether a Palestinian-American will be permitted to speak onstage in Chicago — home to one of the country’s largest Palestinian populations, in a convention for a party that contains profound internal schisms over Gaza. In a moving essay this week, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates bemoaned the “one major omission of the party that claims diversity as its strength.”

With these reclaimings, Democrats have pulled off something remarkable, and long overdue. They have laid their claim to the heart, the center, of the country. They have refused to be marginalized. Their challenge will be to resist being lulled by this middleness into moderation. It will be to remember to stand for big, real things and remember people who still live along the edges.

_ _ _ _

Myself, I think this analysis is right on. Having been around long enough to remember when these words and values became anathema to Democrats, I can explain it with one word:

Vietnam.

It was very easy back then to see those words and values as being lies that had been told to make us the “good guys” in a war that was the antithesis of all five. Trying to undertstand the war led to the rediscovery of our true history (changing “The Battle of Sand Creek” to “The Sand Creek Massacre,” for example) that set one thinking that everything about the country was a lie.

That is true, and also not true at the same time.

Yes, those events happened that way, and the “dark side” of America has often been dominant, but the fact of the progress that also happened in reaction to that dark side, the rediscovery of that history - which is on display this week - is proof of the “bright side” of America, that we are an idea, an ideal, a work in progress, and that Lincoln’s “better angels” exist and are found in those values, properly recognized. That “we can overcome.”

I think we Democrats really are finally ready to win the election of 1968.

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