Bad vibes

Whatever happened to the politics of joy?

Not long ago, Kamala Harris was running a “good vibes” campaign. Hers were the “politics of joy.”

In fact, Harris had a lot to be joyful about. Suddenly, without having won a single vote, this woman, widely considered a flop as vice president, was her party’s nominee for president. Not only that, she was running slightly ahead of her opponent in the polls.

But now that Harris’ lead has disappeared, so have the good vibes and the joy. They have been replaced by something much darker.

Harris is calling her opponent a fascist. Fascism is a form of totalitarianism,. Donald has manifested some authoritarian tendencies, but never totalitarian ones.

Calling Trump a fascist isn’t just a case of mislabeling. Given the historical connotation of the word, ascribing it to a non-fascist is reprehensible. This would be true even if Trump hadn’t already been the subject of two assassination attempts.

Harris’ accusation also gives rise to this concern: If Harris deems Trump a fascist and if she considers fascism evil (which it is), how can we be confident that, if elected president, she won’t punish Trump’s followers? It’s a short step from demonizing one’s political opponents to cracking down on them.

Therefore, I view Harris’ willingness to call Trump a fascist as evidence of her own authoritarian tendencies.

But the bad vibes emanating from the Harris campaign aren’t confined to her utterances. The two Obamas are making their own non-joyous contributions on Harris’ behalf.

I’ve already discussed Barack Obama’s attempt to shame black males into voting for Harris. “The brothers,” he claims, are resisting Harris because they aren’t “feeling” the idea of having a woman as president. When your surrogates are insulting a core group within the Democratic base, that’s the politics of spite, not of joy.

Now, Michelle Obama has taken the spite one step further. Despairing of her husband’s ability to persuade black men to overcome their “sexism,” she’s calling on black women to browbeat their black husbands into submission. This was her exhortation:

To the women listening: We have every right to demand the men in our lives do better by us. We have to use our voices to make these choices clear to the men that we love. Our lives are worth more than their anger and disappointment.

To the Obamas, then, black men aren’t just sexist. They are petulant kids in need of direction from a half-black former president and from the women in their lives. And to Michelle Obama, black women are too weak, absent her encouragement, to discuss politics with the men in their lives.

I agree with Ed Morrissey: The Harris campaign has degenerated into something angry, ugly, and desperate. (Trump’s campaign has always been angry and ugly — that’s me speaking, not Ed M.)

I also agree that the campaign’s approach to clinging to the black male vote seems almost calculated to have the opposite effect. As Ed puts it:

The good news [for Harris] is that this message will resonate in one key demo: the Womens Studies majors subset of college graduates. The bad news is that the young-men demo is a lot larger. And the really bad news is that Kamala already had a lock on the Womens Studies majors. . . .

 It's as if Democrats want to lose young men for a generation. . . .

In sum, having already demonized the large number of MAGA Americans as followers of a fascist, Team Harris is now demeaning black men as sexist and infantile. In a short period of time, Harris has come a long way from the politics of joy.