Kamala Harris is campaigning on “joy,” which is interesting, but I find the backlash against Trump’s running mate JD Vance more interesting. Here’s why.
Harris and her running mate Walz are campaigning on “joy,” which seems to be the Democrats’ new favorite word after “weird.” Not only is every pro-Harris media outlet literally repeating the word “joy” as often as possible, the publicity photos like this one in the Guardian almost universally show the pair laughing as if Harris just said something incredibly funny and clever (she didn’t).
Conservative critics have been quick to point out that this choice in marketing closely resembles the Strength Through Joy program in Nazi Germany. However, I don’t think that’s quite true. From Wikipedia:
On November 27, 1933, Strength through Joy was announced by Robert Ley as a subset of the German Labour Front whose goal was to provide Germans with access to once-privileged leisure activities such as cruises and the ownership of motorcars.[5] The government feared that increasing wages would dampen the rearmament process and decided to raise living standards differently to influence the opinion of Nazism, and paid for the program by taking deductions from workers’ wages.[6] By providing these luxuries, the government hoped that class divisions would be bridged leading to the building of a ‘people’s community,’ and that a common national consciousness would end class conflict and enable all classes to work together for the greater benefit of the nation. A key feature of the people’s community was the overall good physical health of the German people, in order to produce a population fit for military service and for work. In addition, it was believed that if workers were given sufficient leisure time and provided with cleaner workplaces morale and productivity would increase, aspects needed of the working class for the rearmament. It initially was intended to focus on controlling evening and weekend leisure time, but after positive reception of KdF train trips, tourism became an important priority.
So the nazis didn’t just put a gun to peoples’ heads and tell them to be happy. They provided tangible and quantifiable reasons to be happy. A German working class family who now had access to, say, a new ice-skating rink or gymnasium might feel happy – AKA – more content with their lot in life. Hitler’s government might even, dare I say it, seem competent and in tune with the needs of the people. Ironically, Strength Through Joy was a mirroring of what the Soviet Union was already doing, the tax-funded collectivization of access to leisure, recreation, and the arts. Perhaps this is what jump-started the trend of anti-communists adapted a watered-down and less effective version of communism without calling it communism
Contrast this with news outlets telling people to salivate on command like Pavlov’s dogs. People watch TV or doom scroll on social media and are told to feel joy, so they do. Maybe all this spontaneous joy masks the obvious absurdity of voting for a person for promises she could do right now because she’s already in office.
So “joy” is the word of the day, but the slogan of the day is We’re Not Going Back. Sure, it’s clever, but raises the question “Going back to what?” The most obvious answer is not going back to a Trump presidency, but there’s a better one. We’re not going back to the old America.
What is the old America? To answer that, let’s take a look at the opposition. A hero is only as good as his villain, after all. We already know Donald “Literally worse than a football team of Hitler and Stalin clones on steroids” Trump, but there’s a new face in town. JD Vance. This guy is interesting because like Trump, he elicits rage from both Democrats and mainstream Republicans. Consider this rant by MSNBC’s Alex Wagner about Vance’s RNC speech:
And that’s the other piece of it, he goes on, he went on a long sort of paragraph at least about this plot in eastern Kentucky, where his 7 or 6 generations of his family are buried, and his hope is that his wife and he are eventually laid to rest there and their kids follow them. And I sort of understand the idea of sharing the burial plot, but it also is, it reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit, and indeed the history that should be determinative in the story of the Vance family, is the history of the eastern Kentucky Vances and not the Vances from San Diego, which is where his wife is from and where her Indian parents are from. But in America, it doesn’t always have to be the white male lineage that trumps that, that defines the family history, that that branch of the tree supersedes all else. And I just think the construction of, of this notion reveals a lot about someone who fundamentally believes in the supremacy of whiteness and masculinity, and it’s couched in a sort of halcyon, you know, revisitation of his roots, but it is actually really revealing about what he thinks matters and who America is, and that America is a place for people with his shared Western background. And that is the idea of America, that is the nation of America that he wants to resurrect.
But this accusation is mirrored on the “right” as well. Consider this piece from a conservative commentator on The Burning Platform:
But before looking at Vance the person and how his biography and views intersect, I want to mention a crucial disagreement I have with his politics.
In fact this issue is deeper than any single political point. It goes to the very conception of America.
In the most crucial part of his vice-presidential acceptance speech, Vance criticized the idea of America. The people he grew up with don’t see the United States as an idea, they see it as a place, he said:
They love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home, and it will be their children’s home, and they would die fighting to protect it.
That is the source of America’s greatness…
Now in that cemetery [where Vance’s family is buried], there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War… generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.
Now. Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principle. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.
—
Welp.
I’ll assume JD Vance means every word he said, that despite his peripatetic travels around the United States – from the Midwest to the Marines to the Midwest to the Northeast to Silicon Valley to the Midwest (and Washington) – he believes his homeland is Appalachia.
Ironically, I’m far more of a homebody than Vance. I’ve lived most of my life within a 100-mile radius of New York City, a place I love, for all its troubles. (This is a great regret of mine; I wish I’d moved more before I had kids.)
But my homeland is not New York.
It’s the United States of America.
And the United States of America is an idea first and foremost.
It’s the greatest idea the world has ever had, the idea that every American citizen has rights guaranteed at our founding by our Constitution2, that everyone is equal before the law, and that anyone who comes here legally and works hard can succeed and become an American.
Further, that every American can move within its borders at any time for any reason. This concept too is fundamental to the United States of America.
Even in the most basic geographic sense, this nation was born in motion. It went West until it couldn’t go any further. It is huge. Houston is further from both Seattle and New York than London is from Moscow.
But any American can move freely around the 50 states, no permits or reasons necessary, no second language needed (yet another reason the efforts early in Covid by states like Rhode Island to restrict interstate movement were an abomination).
Confirmed Israeli Mossad asset American conservative commentator Ben Shapiro also agreed that Vance was a bad choice for Trump’s VP:
Natalism is important. One can make a good case that a government can focus too much on natalism to the detriment of other issues but it is not something that can be ignored either. Shapiro’s argument is therefore based on absurdity. Advocating for natalism offends single women, therefore it should be ignored. But in the context of Shapiro’s other talking points from his bosses in Israel opinions, being anti-natalist makes sense. He is, in his own words, very pro-immigration.
So that is the problem with Vance. He’s too nationalist, natalist, and “ist” in general. When the Harris team says “We’re Not Going Back,” they’re not referring to Trump specifically, they mean the America he believes in or at least pays lip service to, the pre-1965 America.
Most people would agree the ending of Jim Crow era discrimination with the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a good thing, however this was not the full story. The end of Jim Crow era marked a major restructuring of American political coalitions, which up to that point were focused on race. One cannot remove the cornerstone of a system without replacing it with something and Jim Crow was no exception. The cornerstone was removed in 1964 and replaced the following year with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which reversed long-standing immigration policy of preferring European protestants over everyone else.
Many years ago I read Huey P. Newton’s (founder of the Black Panthers) autobiography Revolutionary Suicide. While I enjoyed the book and his political rants about communist black power, my white liberal brain could not fathom the main idea his entire belief system hinged on. In a nutshell, like Malcom X, Newton advocated for voluntary segregation. Black communities were to become self-sufficient and not dependent on “the man.”
The new coalitions required a concession not just from racist southern dixiecrats (like Joe Biden), but from the entire conservative establishment who up until that point demanded ethnic nationalism. From 1965 onward, ethnic nationalism was abandoned and replaced by civic nationalism, patriotism. All national identity, white, black, or other, needed to be erased and replaced by allegiance to the state. Because at the end of the day, that’s all “civic nationalism” is. Loyalty to the regime. That is the only loyalty that can be depended on. If a man is an ethnic nationalist, he will oppose the regime if he feels his ethnicity is under attack. If a man is a Christian nationalist, he will oppose the regime if he feels his religion is under attack. But if a man is a civic nationalist, he will remain loyal right up to the end when he’s sent to the camp.
Democrats today do talk about race more than ever, but pay attention to how they frame the issue, it is actually the polar opposite of what Newton and his contemporaries were advocating for. The “African American” and the other hyphenated Americans are not the militant black nationalist of yesteryear. They are obedient and docile civic nationalists. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I have ever met a real black nationalist, they’re all dead by now I guess. The irony here is that I think I could find some common ground with a black nationalist than the “never Trumper” African American. How am I supposed to persuade someone to understand my interests if he doesn’t even know his own?
Conservatives love to babble “I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it,” which is the most incredibly stupid thing any human being has ever said. If someone actively wants to hurt you, then you shouldn’t want to defend him, that’s the logic of a moron or a civic nationalist, which is almost the same thing. Not all morons are civic nationalists but all civic nationalists are morons.
Incidentally, birthright citizenship through right of soil alone without right of blood (citizenship of the parent) is highly unusual.
The conservative whines about “wokeness” but has the most woke idea imaginable without even realizing it. Being “American” is just a card you can get in a cereal box, with no requirements or obligations besides being a person who happens to be standing in the USA. When someone like Trump or Vance so much as hints at something that could be construed as ethnic nationalism, the conservative recoils in horror, and this is the reason why. It is also why “weird” is the go-to insult by both liberals and conservatives alike against Vance. Accusing someone of being “weird” is the perfect gaslighting technique and it has succeeded. Even suggesting that someone should think about or value anything except total subservience and loyalty to the state is weird.
We’re not going back!
Ian Kummer
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I’m not sure you can even have ethnic nationalism with the demographics of the current United States. People of European descent might not even be a majority in the next decade. It makes more sense in European countries, although you still have the contradiction of liberal democracies and “free markets” often overriding the public interest.
The demographics worked until, probably, the 1990s
Well sure, that was probably the last chance for it to realistically happen, ie a Pat Buchanan style national conservativism. But even as far back as the late 19th century, business interests were agitating for cheap labor from Mexico (and got it, to some degree).
Ethnic cohesion is the basis of a nation, always has been. There are no multi-ethnic nations.
There can be multi-ethnic countries though, but they wont survive long. I see the U.S. separating into two or more, mostly based on ethnicity.
Europe can still be saved, I pray.
Ethnic cohesion is the basis of a nation, always has been. There are no multi-ethnic nations.
China? Roman Empire? Islamic Caliphate? Ottoman Empire? France?
I take it Nigeria asd South Africa are ethnically homogeneous?
Those aren’t nations, those are civilizations. You can add America and Russia to that list.
The nation-STATE otoh is a 19th century European invention (e.g., Belgium). They are the exception, not the rule! I don’t think they stand a chance and IMO they will not last until the 22nd century.
all those civilizations had a dominant ethnicity and culture which everyone else was required to accept without complaint. some allowed small groups to live outside it in the empire but would have never tolerated those small groups to question the authority and supremacy of the dominant culture
china is also a ridiculous example. han chinese have dominated for a very long time and the current government openly speaks of their dominance.