Freedom
The North Star and guiding principle of American democracy has always been freedom. It is, therefore, not surprising that Vice President Kamala Harris is centering her presidential campaign on that word and what it would mean for Americans under her administration.
In her first campaign ad, she calls it “freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.” To drive the point home, Beyoncé can be heard belting out her anthem, “Freedom, freedom, I can’t move. Freedom cut me loose. Freedom, freedom where are you, cause I need freedom too.” You get the idea.
It could also mean a freedom not mentioned in the ad: A Harris victory could deliver freedom from Donald Trump. Hopefully forever. As one historian wrote, the modern presidential selection format is not hospitable to “losers.” There is an unwritten rule: You lose, you leave. Not since Adlai Stevenson in 1956 has a person been nominated twice and lost twice. He didn’t get a third try. And Trump would be well past 80 in 2028. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the next three months will determine whether our democracy as we have known it survives. If he is defeated, 99 days from now might be the last time Donald Trump is a threat to our country. Think about that for a moment.
Beyond all the energy and enthusiasm of the Harris candidacy, also think about the possibility that we’d never again have to hear Trump’s outrageous demagoguery. At a rally in Florida last week, he told the crowd to “... get out and vote! Just this time — you won’t have to do it anymore. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore.”
Because Trump and his campaign aren’t sure what to do about Kamala Harris, he has doubled down on authoritarian tropes — you won’t have to vote again, because we will no longer have elections. As predictable as the sun rising, he and his allies have fallen back on their most basic instincts — a mix of denigration, disparagement, and belittling.
Before last week, the Trump campaign was trained on Biden. Now they have had to pivot to a very different candidate, one whose story is not well known despite her having been in public life for decades. In a rush to define her before she could, the Trump/Vance campaign went with hate. It’s hate from scratch. Trump himself is all-in, calling Harris “evil,” a “bum,” a “liar” (that’s rich) and a “crazy liberal who would destroy the country.”
From his surrogates, it’s even worse, exploiting white male grievances and fears of women and people of color in power. Some have called Harris a “jezebel,” an immoral woman. Her citizenship has been falsely questioned, a la Barack Obama, because her parents are immigrants. Some Republican leaders on the Hill are calling the vice president a diversity hire. These misogynistic and racist slurs have no place in America today or any day.
In other words, they are claiming that all of her accomplishments have come only because of the color of her skin and her gender. Her successes as California attorney general, a United States senator, and vice president derived not from her ability, her hard work, her intelligence, her experience, or her education, but because she was given an unfair advantage.
Former White House adviser Susan Rice has called it “incredibly insulting,” adding, “That’s what they’re saying with this DEI thing. That if you’re somebody who is not a white Christian man, then you didn’t get where you got because you deserved it.”
Trump and company’s denigration of Harris aligns with their agenda. As they keep saying, they want to “make America great again.” The America that they want to revert back to was one where women, people of color, people with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community were considered to be lesser people. The idea of freedom was reserved mostly for white men. And the laws of the country supported that view. Since then we have made considerable progress. A second Trump administration would undo much of it.
Since Donald Trump entered the political arena, the American people have been subjected to nine years of chaos, gaslighting, and lies. If the Harris campaign can effectively promise freedom from the instability and regression that define Donald Trump, Democrats and others believe that alone may be a winning platform.
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The sad part is that, even if Trump is defeated in November, there is now a base that supports his thinking and someone else will take up his mantle of trying to convince Americans that we are better off with autocracy. We have to remain vigilant long after this election cycle and enact more legislation and protections that preserve our freedoms and all the best parts of democratic ideals. We now see the cracks. They must be sealed.
Please tell everyone that DEI stands for dedicated, energetic and intelligent. Let’s redefine this slur.