Not Going Back

The metaphor that came to mind last month was that the music has changed. The last nine to ten years have been dominated by a tone of fear, belittling, obsession with conspiracies, and anger.

That tone began a decade ago when Trump propagated the belief that Obama wasn’t born in the US and was thereby not allowed to be president. The tone continued when he was a presidential candidate in 2015. In primary debates with his Republican opponents, he honed his ability to humiliate and denigrate.

To the surprise of many political pundits, Trump found that many people had an appetite for his preference for taking the low road. That same negative tone continued through the last decade and dominated until last month. That anger and fear produced the January 6 insurrection, intimidating into submission Republican leaders like Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, and Lindsay Graham, whose initial reaction was to correctly blame Trump for the assault. But within days, those party leaders fell in line along with other Republicans who saw the violence of January 6 as proof of how Trump could threaten them and their families.

Biden’s presidency was unable to escape Trump’s negative tone. With Trump’s false claim that he won the 2020 election, he and his devoted followers were always in the background, distracting our nation and keeping Trump in the news.

Age might have caught up with Biden—he is eighty-one, after all—but four years of trying to counter Trump’s dark message must have been a key factor in his stepping aside. Biden could hardly run on a slogan of “Turn the page,” and if he had stayed in the race, the 2024 election would be a replay of the issues from 2020. Matters looked bleak for the Democratic party.

But if Trump and his followers believed that Biden’s stepping aside would guarantee a victory for them, they misjudged the country. Harris and Walz have changed the soundtrack of the upcoming election. The new mood and tone felt across the country is not one of anger and fear, but joy. Yes, after a decade of derision and division, joy has entered into politics. Joy at America’s potential. Joy at the privilege of serving in government. Joy at the chance to go forward as a nation, not backwards.

Trump’s camp has already shown how it will respond. Trump is doubling-down on the only message he has, a message of derision, conspiratorial thinking, fear, and anger. Trump’s problem is that the majority of Americans have lost their appetite for his paranoid shtick. We’re tired of the music he plays over and over again. He isn’t scary, just boring.

Will Harris and Walz win in November? I hope so, but I don’t know. I have no doubt that they will win the popular vote, but the Electoral College is harder to predict.

Of one thing I am sure. The political mood in the country is changing. And with that, it’s accurate to say that for the majority of Americans, “We’re not going back.”