Fresh Air — and I don't mean Terri Gross

I thought this column on the launch if the Harris-Walz campaign was quite good, but it didn't quite find a home, so here we go.

If you felt a welcome breath of fresh air flowing through Kamala Harris' August 6 rally in Philadelphia to introduce the world to her new running mate Tim Walz, you weren't alone — and you weren't wrong. Social media lit up with the left side of the American political dial wrestling with unfamiliar emotions like hope, positivity, or the absence of dread.

The event was by turns sweet (Harris referring the Minnesota Governor as "Coach Walz"), sharp (Walz's applause line about Donald Trump's one-man crime wave while in office), and a bit blue (Walz's other applause line referencing an internet meme about JD Vance). In all, it was auspicious start for the new team, leaving Trump and his surrogates sputtering and grasping blindly for a way, any way, to respond.

The next day Harris and Walz did it again, in an Eau Claire rally that had attendees tossing around words like "hope-filled" and "inspiring." 

"We make personal choices for ourselves because we know there’s a golden rule, mind your own damn business. I don’t need you telling us about our health care. I don’t need you telling us who we love, and I sure the hell don’t need you telling us what books we’re gonna read,"

Walz thundered. By contrast, Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance was left to kick around the tires of Air Force Two and sulk about Harris not taking questions from the press.

It has been a very long road to get to this point. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, American society has been engaged in a protracted struggle to decide whether it will be ruled as a pluralistic democracy — one that allows for power-sharing across race, gender, or social lines — or as a minoritarian apartheid regime.

That is a binary choice. Despite what pundits or professional triangulators might want to tell you, there are no third options.

As anyone who has ever weighed a volume of Rick Perlstein's histories can tell you, there's a lot of complicated history between 1965 and today. But things more or less came to a head with the successive election of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, each in their own way overt manifestations of that binary choice.

American society narrowly rejected Trump's attempt to implement the minoritarian vision in 2020. Likewise, American democratic guardrails narrowly fended off his corrupt attempt to continue his path down the road to authoritarianism. Joe Biden was the electoral spearhead of that effort.

But the choice between pluralism and apartheid is as much about culture as it is policy or legal matters. It's about whose voice, whose vision, gets to set the narrative for American society as a whole. And whatever else you want to say about Biden or the way he governed, voters didn't see in him an effective representative of that vision.

Because pluralism as a cultural phenomenon, at least in present-day American society, is deeply intertwined with generational shifts. Simply put, people couldn't embrace an old white dude as a champion of pluralism. That might be the real source of the feelings that "Biden is too old" to continue leading the small-d democratic coalition.

Still, I and many others thought that replacing Biden at the top of ticket was taking an awful risk. But the outpouring of energy for Harris and now Walz convinces me at least that voters have been hungry for leaders who look like and talk like and act like them. That's who they want to put up against Trump and Vance and the rest of the Legion of Doom: smiles and dad jokes and Mamala vs. the scowls and the creeps, the tin-pot dictators and, yes, all the sheer weirdness of modern cultural conservatism.

That's the alternative pundits keep mistaking for a third way. Voters across the United States just want to live like normal people, without worrying about what right will be taken away next, or what war they'll be steered into, or what new economic oppression will be laid on them.

Voters don't want "neither Democrat nor Republican, left nor right." They want to wake up in the morning and enjoy a blissful, boring day without Donald Trump dominating the news. They want someone to say what everyone knows but no one can admit: the emperor has no clothes.

And if the mascots for the battle to get to that point are relatively younger leaders who like to laugh and make the occasional off-color joke? Even better. Anything beats the endless outrage, grievance and resentment served up by right-wing media.

So no, the enthusiasm for Harris and Walz and what they represent isn't a honeymoon or a "sugar high" or a huge mistake that will offend swing voters across America's heartland. It just might be the leading indicator of real, deep, sustained cultural change.

I don't want to oversell this point. Any serious scholar of American society knows that the contest between pluralism and apartheid is perhaps the animating struggle of our politics, and has been since before the nation itself was formed. One presidential election is not going to sort out a conflict that has been going for hundreds of years.

But it does seem possible that we go at least further down the road to pluralistic democracy, maybe even further than we've ever been before. Obama started the nation on that path again, and the importance of electing a Black president and possibly a Black and Asian Madam President, can't be overstated.

Still, Obama was a hesitant, risk-averse leader, in many ways uncomfortable with being the icon of cultural change. Harris, by contrast, won't have the baggage of being a pioneer in the same way. She will be much freer to simply be herself, and my hunch is that as the all-important suburban swing voters get to know that self, they're going to like what they see.

If the start of Harris' belated, not-quite-accidental campaign is any indication, things are already headed in exactly that direction.