Not Going Back

A New Democratic Party?

There is an assumption to the slogan “We’re not going back.” It is an assumption that has eluded the Democratic Party in an era dominated by various identity and interest groups, when grievance conveyed credibility and pessimism about America prevailed. The startling, improbable assumption is this: We have made progress. We have moved past the ethnic cliches and racial obsessions of old. We are victors not victims. And the only place in the world where this could happen was in the United States of America. We have experienced a human rights miracle in the past 60 years. That’s why we love our country. That’s why we’re patriots. That’s why we’re so damn joyous.

It was there, staring us in the face all week at the Democratic convention…but it came home for me when Pete Buttigieg—and boy, is he good—talked about the fraught normality of him and his husband,Chasten, trying to feed the three-year old twins mac and cheese with the phone ringing and all hell breaking loose. The sheer everyday normality of that would have been impossible a generation ago. Their marriage is quotidian now. In the grand sweep of human history, there has never been a movement for tolerance and dignity that achieved its goals so quickly—and its goal was only that: normality.

All week we saw eloquent, brilliant members of the black middle class—a disproportionate number of the speakers, but boy can they preach—speaking about the progress they’ve made, the things they achieved. I had a rooting interest, as regular Sanity Clause readers know, in the success of Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, an old friend—and he was fabulous. But there were so many others, none of them begging for special treatment or favors; all of them touting their accomplishments, the challenges they overcame—and saying, we’re not going to give them up now: we’re not going back. This was the message delivered by Shamala Harris, Kamala’s immigrant mother: No excuses. When you get knocked down (by racist bullies, one assumes), you get back up and push through.

Normality. All they want was to be treated like everyone else, even if they had disabilities, like Tim Walz’s son Gus—whose pure joy at seeing his father up there, That’s my dad! was the emotional exclamation point on the week. (And Ann Coulter’s mockery of the kid should further extinguish the declining career of that skeletal, cynical harridan.)

And then, Kamala. The rhetoric didn’t soar. It was plain and tough. The delivery was solid, forceful, confident—compare it with the endless meandering narcissism of Trump’s acceptance speech. The most important word in Kamala’s address was the one she used to describe the U.S. military under her command, lethal. Girls aren’t supposed to talk like that. She did, credibly. Did she dance back foolish positions she’d taken in the past? Implicitly, yes, but not explicitly. Trump’s idiot, selfish massacre of the bipartisan illegal immigration bill has neutered the best issue he had going. Harris may have made a hash of an impossible job—securing the border without any authority to do so—but Trump betrayed his own party, and the American people, by having his toadies scuttle the bill. It was an unprecedented crime of political cynicism. He may have turned a winning issue into a loser.

But, I suspect I’ve buried the lede: The Democrats are not a party of woe-is-me victims anymore. They are not the party of dilettante leftist academics—even Bernie Sanders, in his ascetic, bloviational speech, didn’t demand Medicare for All, but settled for eyeglasses and hearing aids for the elderly. The Democrats shucked the left this week. They became the party of optimists and strivers, of blended marriages and mixed marriages, of the vast human complications of the 21st century. They are the party of frozen eggs and IVF, and the private dread of praying that scientific procedures will produce desperately desired babies. They are also the party of grieving parents, whose children were killed by automatic weapons.

Most of all, they are the party—as presented this week—of neighbors. And the neighbors, as often as not in 21st century suburbia, are people whose skin color may be different, but who can gossip together about this teacher or that in their kids’ middle school, and who can root together for the Mets or Mankato East, and who can be thrilled by Simone Biles or Katie Ledecky without even registering, for a nanosecond, their melanin-level, but celebrating their utter Americanness.

This is the American future. It is my mixed, international family’s future. Thirty years ago, I predicted the Gringos’ Revenge, the fierce, frightened, ugly reaction of white Americans to a heterogenous majority country. Trump rode that wave. But there was a counter-reaction brewing, of all the kids who had parents like Shamala Harris, of all the straight kids who had gay friends, of all the kids who didn’t even see race (as mine never have, sometimes to my amazement).

Kamala Harris is their candidate. I probably don’t agree with her on some issues, but she is my candidate, too. Because issues aren’t very important this year. Because Donald Trump is the political Devil incarnate, the avatar of all that would destroy our lovely experiment in tolerance and self-governance.

But not just that: I think, I hope Harris might make this incredibly blessed country less angry and more happy again.