It’s being discussed more and more, but I truly think one of the most powerful and still underrated forces in the election is going to be the joy and relief millions feel watching Coach Walz and imagining that their dads and uncles and neighbors could wake up from their hatred.
An argument against hatred and extremism and misogyny and resentment is powerful. But a living embodiment of someone who could have gone that way but didn’t — this is a force all its own.
It’s very hard to rebut and fact-check and out-argue and deprogram these men who fell prey to Rupert Murdoch’s profit lust.
But when you see an older white guy who is just happy and can’t wait for the future — wow. It is going to burrow deep into many people with lost relatives.
It’s going to make people feel rage at what was stolen from them. And it’s going to show them, not tell them but show, what might yet be possible. There are years that could still be reclaimed.
Yes, the Trump tax cuts were bad. The immigration policy a catastrophe. The Covid policy a calamity. But this — this is unfathomable in scale. Millions of our people were turned into grist for the Murdoch mill, and broken, and from the shards of them a movement was made.
It’s one of these phenomena that underlie politics but isn’t often discussed when discussing politics. But trust me: people feel as strongly about this as about monetary policy or tax cuts. Their kinfolk were stolen by billionaires. Their minds, their hearts, their loving selves.
Dads who lovingly braided their daughters’ hair and practiced spelling bee words with them now malign their freedoms and the people they love and the families they have made. They were stolen. People want their families back. And this is going to become a theme of this campaign.
We are neighbors. We are family. We are each other’s people. Damn the thieves. We must depose them and find each other again. And now we glimpse how.
Perhaps the key emotion of 2008 was people’s desire to prove, and believe, that their country could transcend its racism. That was a force more powerful than any policy question. I wonder if the deeper force in this race is going to become this sense of reclaiming our neighbors.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty
This post was originally published on The.Ink.