Just Like That, a Breath of Fresh Air Clears Out the Gloom

There is a huge sense of relief out there

Photo by Sam Schooler on Unsplash

Here in Western NY, we are having a typical hot muggy summer, though not as hot as a lot of the country, thank God. But I was up at six this morning, and though it was cool outside, my apartment was humid and stuffy, so I turned on the AC for a few minutes to clear out the moist air.

And in a few minutes the job was done and the AC was off, for now. And this metaphor was so obvious to me that I sat for a few minutes just thinking about the last week, a remarkable one in American politics.

Last night, in her newsletter, Letters From An American, historian Heather Cox Richardson neatly summarized how events in US politics have a history of changing like this, slowly and then all at once. It’s a good read for those of us looking over our shoulders at the Republican horde in the distance.

In my air conditioning metaphor, I reserved the idea that I will be turning to it to cool things down when they inevitably heat up again. That’s just being realistic. But I also want to just enjoy seeing a good portion of our country realizing we are not inevitably marching down a dark road to disaster.

The Kamala blast of fresh air feels real and it has unleashed a pent up need for a little joy in American politics, after an unrelenting onslaught of negativity from Trump and the extreme right. And now we see them scrambling to respond to these changes, but they have a huge problem and it comes directly from Mr. Trump himself.

They literally have no positive story to tell. After years of telling all of us we live in a hellhole and hordes of evil, insane immigrant criminals are everywhere, they can’t shift gears. Instead they are cycling through a series of lies, silly insults, misogynist hate, and the division that has characterized everything in Trump’s political life.

At this point they know nothing else and their deluge of negativity has kept them from developing any kind of policy, political accomplishment, or unity they can fall back on as the fear campaign fizzles.

This is the problem with hate as a political tool. You cannot defeat hate with more hate, and Kamala Harris seems to know this…