Thanks to the Harris-Walz campaign, The Democracy is a deep far from where we were six weeks ago. There are countertruths implicit in this transition—lasting lessons about continuity and change that might even turn around exit leftists. (The breed who avowed earlier this summer: “We’re leaving the USA when Trump wins.”)
Let’s begin with wisdom in a bracing piece Lucian K. Truscott IV posted before Biden bowed out, back when Trump’s re-ascendence seemed inevitable to many Americans. Truscott mused he’d “never seen people so depressed about the state of our union,” but he refused to go for their gloom. Trump wasn’t a sure thing, and even if the Don won, Truscott pointed out it was mad to assume the Republican Project 2025 was a fait accompli. He noted, for instance, that canny resistors would put the brakes on any plan to “scrap the civil service and fire thousands of civil servants and replace them with Trump loyalists…
Most civil service positions are protected by laws passed by Congress. Any attempt at a wholesale firing of civil servants would be met by a fusillade of lawsuits that would generate a corresponding fusillade of legal “stays,” blocking the execution of the Trump executive order. In a familiar phrase, it ain’t gonna happen in the manner or to the extent Trump and his acolytes think it is.
Truscott refused to treat Trumpists’ “laughable” plan as an “existential threat to our democracy.” The world, he insisted, was not about to “stop turning on its axis.” Truscott dug into his own dailiness to resist apocalypse-mongers…
This morning I woke up and went out with our dog, Ruby, and just for the hell of it, I walked down to the end of our street in Milford, PA, to check the Delaware River and found that it hasn’t turned itself around to run upstream.
To believe all the bullshit being cranked out by Donald Trump and the Republican Party, to believe they are all-powerful, to believe a Republican victory in November is inevitable, you’d have to believe that the Delaware River is running backwards. It’s not.
Truscott busted potential deserters who planned to skip out of the U.S. if Donald Trump wins: “you are going to miss out on the wrath of the biggest movement going into battle in the biggest fight in the history of this country”—which he insisted is still “the best in the world.”
Faith in country and human continuity are habits of mind/heart that tend to get linked with conservatives. (It’s not irrelevant that Truscott comes from a military family.) God knows, I wished there were acute rightists with working bullshit detectors in the rooms when Trumpers began claiming the Don’s brush with death in July had made him a “changed man”:
GOP allies, in roughly a dozen interviews, used words like “emotional” and “serene” — even “spiritual” — to describe Trump in the days since the attempt on his life. A person close to the former president’s family described him taking on “humility, in the biblical sense…” One Republican who spoke with Trump, granted anonymity to describe private discussions, said he seemed “existential.”
But character can’t be shucked off in a hot second by a luke-warm take. Trump was never “on the verge of leading a different life.” “Existential,” in this case, was just another word for asshole. “I am who I am,” as Trump told Republican donors after the RNC.
Nobody should’ve been surprised by Trump’s return to the mean. But I wouldn’t just indict Trump whisperers for bad faith. I’d sentence them to read in the Great Tradition where they’d learn from classic novels how character is time-drenched and perdurable. In a perfect world-library, Trump would be pilloried by Dickens or Thackeray. Though their characters don’t always come down to caricatures. They knew that most of us, unlike America First’s beast, aren’t stuck on static. With help from authors or others who take us outside our ignoble egos, we can even make moral progress. On that score, George Eliot might be the 19th C. novelist we need most now. Not to comprehend Trump’s monkey-mind, but to make sense of this political season’s down-to-zero and up-Up-UP. Humans in Eliot’s tellings are the most transitional of all beings.
What “fascinates” Eliot (per Philip Davis who’s traced how she transferred her own changes into her books)…
is the unimaginably precise point which T.S. Kuhn in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was to describe as a paradigm shift, the moment when the old framework of understanding becomes so shaken by realized anomalies within itself that it must give away to a successor… “The new real future replacing the imaginary”: but replacing it only gradually, bearably.[1]
The Kuhn reference may seem odd but it’s apt since Eliot’s sense of life was shaped by her and her husband George Lewes’s readings in the human and natural sciences. Eliot and Lewes put their own spin on ideas of evolution in their writings. It was the distinction between “the mechanically resultant” and “dynamically emergent” that made science matter to Eliot. Take the composition of H2O. (From the Delaware River to the mill on the floss?) Water was life for Eliot and Lewes who caught a wave from J.S. Mill’s “Logic”: “Not a trace of the properties of hydrogen or of oxygen is observable in those of their compound, water.”
It was Lewes himself who made an important breakthrough in using the term “emergent” in contrast to “resultant” when thinking about the concept of “effects.” He wanted to make a distinction between the mere regrouping of pre-existent materials—which was the simple mechanical resultant and on the other hand, the emergent evolution of something dynamically new, unpredictable at its first appearance because not immediately known in advance. A measurement simply results from the sum of its units: 1+2=3. But there are other products which are not quantitatively aggregated but embody a quality not seen separately, beforehand, in any of the elements that came together to create it. An emergent effect, says Lewes “cannot be reduced” either to the sum or to the difference of its components.[2]
Kamalamentum anyone?
Harris’s rise is irreducible. When she failed during her campaign for president in 2019-20, there was no sign she might ripen. On the debate stage, she broke through only once when she challenged Biden’s dismissal of busing. But she ended up exposing herself as someone who’d burnt a race card pointlessly since she hadn’t thought through how to change America’s approach to caste-bound public schools. (May she take up that issue again for real, for real.) Her forgettable campaign led to her Vice Presidency, where she has mainly served under the radar. Which may have been for the best. We’d need a George Eliot (or God, same difference) to tell the story of her germination during her tenure as VP. All we know now is that Harris has (somehow) risen to the moment of this moment. Millions have witnessed her shifting like an Eliot heroine from one personal “epoch” to another, “via ‘I must’ to ‘I will.’”[3] Or as Harris has it: “When we fight, we win.”
Under heavy manners, Harris has been nearly flawless. She’s been tactful toward her boss, yet she’s still acted “presidential.” We may wish political theater mattered less in our democracy of spectacle, but this isn’t the time for lame actors. Harris also nailed her first big decision. She was right to choose Governor Walz as her running mate over the safer choice—popular swing state governor Josh Shapiro. Walz seems more authentic than Gov. (“Y’all”) Shapiro who comes across as a hollow Obama wannabe. Philly Shapiro’s career as a prosecutor who arrived on the coast (just like Harris) made his back story too close to the VP’s; Minny Waltz, by contrast, was more of a stretch. And Harris’s readiness to reach out to a representative heart-lander made their personal connection signify more. It helped spark those fine and rangy vibes at the DNC that you could feel through the tv screen. I didn’t watch the Convention straight through but each night I was charmed by displays of (sorry) diversity, equity and inclusion, which didn’t reduce to race. (Perhaps because people of color were everywhere and avatars of the black nation presided over the whole shebang.) I dug the Republicans and the neurally divergent and labor leader Fain (railing against corporate greed) and billionaire Pritzker (using his own wealth to mock Trump) and Clinton/Obama doubling down on Trump’s “weird” obsessions. Each came through on his/her own but all together they were making a party. Like those Minnesota delegates on Waltz’s night who didn’t want to go back to their hotel.
Maybe I should retire George Eliot from this piece. Severely intelligent, she didn’t have a beamish bone in her body and was probably an instinctive party-pooper like most real intellectuals. Yet it’s also true that she was an echt liberal whose art-life was informed by Novalis (“It is certain my conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul believes in it”) and Goethe’s Elective Affinities. Eliot knew from vibes…
These then, were those great experiential surprises and excitements which more literal-minded people might simply ignore or deny. That words and thoughts could connect people at a subterranean mental level. That an internal belief felt more true, more objective when freely found and independently held—and not simply repeated and re-enforced—by another person. That genuine alliances were not achieved through pre-concerted agreements or imitation but were most authentically realized through the differences between people. It was the translation across those differences, not just despite them, that made for a wonderful overcoming of what otherwise had often seemed an inescapable loneliness.[4]
Time for Jasmine Crockett’s close-up. Not that I’m all in there. Rep. Crockett seems like a woman in a hurry. Still, I was taken by her tale of her first encounter with an empathetic Kamala. The VP’s responsiveness (“What’s wrong?”) to the young Congresswoman on her first visit to the White House broke Crockett down and out of loneliness. I felt their shared overcoming (“She saw through me.”) with help from Sisters in the audience caught looking on as the camera cut away from Crockett’s speech (even if the resolution of her story nearly killed her vibe: “The next month I went viral for the first of many times to come for hitting Republicans…”).
I’m flashing on Eliot’s famous affirmation of intimations: “the greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.” Pols can stretch us too as Kamala’s convention suggests. (Pace Obamas who’ve proved it time and again.)
Operatives at the DNC won one case for contraction. It was wrong not to have someone on the podium to rep Palestinian-Americans. Yet Harris’s tone was right when she addressed double-truths of war and suffering in Gaza in her acceptance speech. She put all of her voice into each half of the moral equation, as if she was trying to will a way forward, not just talk out of both sides of her mouth. It was good…acting (and ok diplomacy).
Harris’s expressions of patriotism didn’t seem rote either. National chauvinism is always iffy. I hate that damn U.S.A. chant. But that’s where the living energy was in Chicago. Eliot is a resource here too. She held (as Davis notes) “‘a human life…should be well rooted in some spot of native land’ before a human being can develop into a ‘citizen of the world, stimulated by abstract nouns.’” Harris’s invocation at the Convention of her spot—”In the Bay, you either live in the hills or the flatlands. We lived in the flats.”—was crisp and felt:
A beautiful working-class neighborhood of firefighters, nurses, and construction workers, all who tended their lawns with pride. My mother worked long hours. And, like many working parents, she leaned on a trusted circle to help raise us. Mrs. Shelton, who ran the daycare below us and became a second mother. Uncle Sherman. Aunt Mary. Uncle Freddy. And Auntie Chris. None of them, family by blood. And all of them, Family. By love. Family who taught us how to make gumbo. How to play chess. And sometimes even let us win. Family who loved us. Believed in us. And told us we could be anything. Do anything.
Her roots rap had a soundtrack: “Aretha. Coltrane. And Miles.” And she found another music when she amped up her mother’s lessons and Michelle Obama’s charge from earlier in the Convention:
My mother was a brilliant, five-foot-tall, brown woman with an accent. And, as the eldest child, I saw how the world would sometimes treat her. But she never lost her cool. She was tough. Courageous. A trailblazer in the fight for women’s health. And she taught Maya and me a lesson that Michelle mentioned the other night— She taught us to never complain about injustice. But…do something about it. She also taught us—Never do anything half-assed. That’s a direct quote.
I’ll end with another direct quote that talks back to the do-nothing party—those above-it-alls and skeptics glad Trump has shrunk but too cool to even watch Kamala’s speech, much less join in the DNC’s joy fest. Believe women (as they say) especially George Eliot: “There is a sort of blasphemy in the proverbial phrase, ‘too good to be true.’”
Notes
1 p. 94, The Transferred Life of George Eliot: The Biography of a Novelist, by Philip Davis, Oxford University Press, 2017. p
2 op. cit. p. 169
3 To tweak a formula in The Transferred Life of George Eliot.
4 op. cit. p. 55