The best politicians are the “happy warriors.” The people who inspire through hope rather than fear, who instill a sense of optimism and pride in the country. Ronald Reagan was one for the right. Barack Obama did the same for the left. Last night, Kamala Harris showed that she is a politician in that same mold.
It certainly helps that Donald Trump hates this country. He pretends to hug the flag, but every speech is about how terrible America is, how many problems we have, and how “only Trump can fix it.” Trump is very much a classical demagogue, playing the same playbook used by every two-bit dictator from time immemorial. The fear of the other, the idolization of brute strength, the cheap appeals to nationalism. It’s all been done before. And now it’s just boring. We’ve heard Trump rant on and on for years now. We’ve simply moved past that.
VP Harris perfectly captures the mood of the country when she says “we’re not going back.” Outside Trump’s narrow cult following, the American people are sick and tired of governance by the whim of an overgrown toddler. January 6th was a psychic scar on this country. The Dobbs decision was another. Trump’s 34 felony convictions was another. Americans are desperately looking for something newer, something better, something more optimistic.
Enter Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, probably the most powerful ticket in Democratic history. It is if they were generated in a lab to meet the moment. Harris the tough prosecutor versus the felon. Coach Walz versus the guy who manages to be a black hole for charisma. Team Ordinary versus Team Weird. And yes, the Republican Party is deeply, deeply, deeeply weird these days. Meanwhile, the DNC was an incredibly tightly-orchestrated celebration of American values.
It’s not just that the Democrats have appropriated the flag and the camo hat from the GOP. They’ve appropriated the sunny optimism and true patriotic spirit of someone like Ronald Reagan. The DNC was a celebration of America. It came off incredibly well, and optimism wins in politics.
Worse for the GOP, Trump is in a meltdown. He was constantly posting through Harris’ speech with incoherent ramblings. He then called into Fox News where he ranted for 10 minutes, hitting keys on his phone in a way that highlights is age and mental instability. When Fox finally cut him off, he ended calling into the far-right Newsmax channel to continue ranting. To put it mildly, he’s losing his fucking marbles. And that behavior highlighted the themes that Harris brought up in her nomination speech.
The GOP has to face the reality: 2016 was a fluke. Trump is not popular, he only won because Hillary Clinton had a bad campaign and Trump was the guy from the teevee. Once Trump revealed that he was not the super businessman he was portrayed on the set of The Apprentice, but an overgrown racist toddler, it was over. But the GOP became addicted to the idea of Trumpian populism being their ticket to total control. The normal people either left the party or were so cowed by Trump’s racist and violent hoards that they decided to go full Reek from Game of Thrones and suppress their common sense, patriotism, and true Christianity.
The result of all this is that Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States of America, the first female President, the first President of South Asian descent, and will likely have coattails that leave the GOP realing for decades. The “conservative” movement in the United States is just a skin suit occupied by a bunch of racists, grifters, populists, fascists, and charlatans. What happens to the GOP after this is not yet known, but the chances of the GOP basically imploding and going the way of the Whigs is higher than it has been at any point in American history. The GOP has had periods of being in the political wilderness, but nothing like this.
What’s more, this shambling zombie of the GOP deserves to die. It has no principles beyond power, it no longer believes in limited government, it no longer believes in fiscal discipline, it no longer believes in the importance of America’s alliances, it no longer has anything resembling a theory of governance beyond the fascist playbook that is Project 2025. That playbook is so odious that Trump is forced to pretend that he has no involvement in it whatsoever.
The Harris/Walz ticket on the other hand, is out there capturing the mantle of sunny optimism, speaking to the better angels of our nature, and actually cares about solving problems that matter to ordinary Americans. Even though the Democrats are still Democrats and still have an overly uncautious belief that the federal government can solve problems from the top down, at least that’s an ethos. And something will be nothing any time.
Kamala Harris will win. Kamala Harris deserves to win. And the GOP deserves to lose, and lose in such a devastating fashion that Trumpism is forever consigned to the scrap-heap of history. And that is precisely the judgment that the American people will bring this November.
