Proofreading: Paweł Ruszczak
source: Wikimedia Commons
In some ways, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s campaign is not unique. Or, to put it differently, their campaign does not seem like a dish of political molecular cuisine prepared by political consulting experts. It is in vain to find in the Harris-Walz campaign scandals, surprising PR moves that are hard to think of, calculated betrayals, or Machiavellian front changes. And yet, it’s hard not to describe Harris’ campaign as in some ways surprising, non-instinctive, and at the same time very well thought out. Most importantly, polls show that the Harris-Walz combination enjoys a level of enthusiasm long unseen by the Democrats. And all this in such a short time that it is difficult to talk about voters being enticed by specific reforms, proposed by Harris (who, after all, belongs to the current administration, so, by political common sense, she should not be expected to introduce very drastic changes). And yet Republicans are struggling, and surprisingly, trying to pin the current administration’s alleged failures on Harris. Surprisingly, because Harris is the current vice president, so pinning Biden’s failures on her should make sense, at least to some extent. Yet it is her campaign that is a “breath of fresh air”, contrasting with Trump, who in this situation is struggling with problems that the incumbent usually struggles with. What then is the source of this unintuitive profile of both candidates? How does Kamala Harris simultaneously enjoy being the epitome of stability and the one challenging the status quo? Finally, what is the reason for such a contrast between what the Harris campaign is and what emotions it evokes?
In a YouTube video, released on Kamala Harris’ channel (titled – which reflects the campaigns’ effort to cultivate a feeling of “homeliness” and casualty – “Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on tacos, music, and the future of America”1), Walz explains the reason for the growing support for the Harris-Walz ticket. He says: “People want to be a part of something that’s winning, they want to be a part of something good, and that everyone can be a part of”. For those about to roll their eyes at a remark like that – that’s what I mean. Walz is not an unceasingly calculating politician, it is the familiarity and abovementioned homeliness that is crucial in the campaign that comes to him very easily. And what Harris lacks in the natural “likeability” that Walz exudes, she makes up for in rhetoric, politicizing and philosophizing about what’s immediately apparent when you listen to Walz. What Americans are desperate for right now is normality.
Americans want people they see as normal to be the ones in power, things they perceive as normal to constitute their reality. Even those potentially attracted to Trump’s promises of mass extradition of millions of illegal immigrants, even if they don’t care how quasi-fascist this proposal is – they can see that it is a radical proposal. This is an aggressive, tense, abnormal proposition – it is a weird proposition. Americans seem now to sense that their country does not need to be run by starting one revolution after another, by signing huge executive orders and even bigger nationwide bans, or by shipping millions of people from one place to another.
Harris and Walz are running largely as the antithesis to such a mode of running a country, on an anti-Trumpist platform.
source: Wikimedia Commons
In a sense, this is what the American right is criticizing the Democrats for. Or it could, if only it weren’t too busy sinking deeper and deeper into the vortex of disinformation attacks and doubling down on a fringe right-wing, downward weird rhetoric. Pointing out that it is currently difficult to say anything very substantial about Harris’ campaign,2 in the sense of her plan for running a country if she wins, is absolutely appropriate.
After all, one could say that Harris’ offer emphasizes a strong attachment to, and dialogue with, pro-labor movements, but that the Democratic candidate will be economically more “for the people” than their Republican counterpart is hardly a surprise to anyone. One could also say that Harris wants to support the middle class because as she says “the middle class built America”, but every candidate always invokes a similar sentiment because at least half of Americans invariably identify with the middle class.3 Finally, Harris supposedly proclaims, regarding the Gaza strip, that “the time for a ceasefire is now.”4, and yet there is some dissatisfaction in civic movements trying to achieve peace between Israel and Palestine, because the Democratic candidate is also part of the current administration, and as Vice President could be doing more.
Harris and Walz therefore lean heavily on mentality, the excitement of change, on optics, and feelings. Traditionally, one would expect a solid, down-to-earth response from the right to burst the “idealistic balloon”. The right, after all, historically tried to cultivate the image of an intellectual environment that wants nothing more than “normality” – away from idealism, utopianism, social justice, racial and moral issues, away from the so-called “Culture War”. In our backyard, this type of rhetoric is being used by the Confederation Party (Konfederacja), which – although the approach of many of its members to cultural issues, like the rights of LGBTQ+ people, minorities, and of women is certainly not normal – is trying to paint itself as a “party of real problems”, a party for people who want “simple law, a small state”, who are not interested in “all these pointless quarrels in the parliament”.
And yet, the Democratic candidate managed to upset the traditional paradigm – now normality is an ideal, and ideals are a normality. You don’t like trans people having rights, or the universal access to abortion? – Too bad, the Harris-Walz campaign seems to be saying, that ship has sailed. In his speeches, Walz places these once controversial elements of the political landscape into the canon of simple, folk, homely normality. Speaking to those who oppose IVF being available for parents wanting to start a family, Walz proclaims: “In Minnesota (…) we know there is a golden rule: ‘mind your own damn business’.”5 And in the same vein, it was Walz who started the trend of saying that Trump and his vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, are “just plain weird.”6 Of course, this in itself is true, but on a literal level, everyone is “weird” in some way or another. So how did such an epithet come from a representative of a party that a couple of years ago would be (really!) reluctant to use such a term (so as not to treat “otherness” as an insult)? And – above all – why has the term stuck so well to Trump and Vance?
source: Flickr
The answer lies in the context. How good a move it was to say that Trump and Vance are weird and that Walz is even running for vice president of the United States is far from obvious. It is the context of where the public debate in the United Stares is today, determines how popular (practically out of nowhere) Kamala Harris is. Throughout virtually the entire campaign, approaching the 2024 elections, Americans were convinced that it would be a repeat of 2020, that neither Trump nor America had changed, and that maybe the move is to wait until the Trump and Biden generation leaves the stage if there is anything left to collect from American democracy after Trump’s second victory. No one expected that enthusiasm for a new – perhaps not yet fully defined – vision of America would erupt like it did. Nobody expected that in the dark days when all one could do was watch Biden’s support wane and Trump’s victory seem increasingly inevitable, Americans managed to – at least partially – digest Trump.
Since 2016, the pejorative “Trump Derangement Syndrome” has been widely diagnosed in many speakers partaking in the American public debate. The term was used to ridicule the public panic that occurred in the so-called US “intellectual elite”, with all the talk about “moving to Canada”, a third world war that would be caused by Trump’s alleged instability and incompetence, and the general “leftist hysteria”, borrowing from the then-popular meme about “triggered SJWs”. But Trump Derangement Syndrome did not only affect the intellectuals, celebrities, and hardline Democrats. Trump’s presence indeed was highly destabilizing, unpredictable, and not only deranging, but deranged.
How does this relate to the above-mentioned context that made today’s narrative about Trump’s “weirdness” so successful? Well, we can risk the thesis that – whatever Donald Trump’s presidency was – Americans have, in a sense, and to some extent, “outgrown” it. The narrative spread by the liberal media that Trump is stupid and unbalanced, the former president’s numerous legal scandals, and finally the storming of the Capitol on January 6 – as unlikely as it seemed just a month ago – tarnished the reputation of the Republican candidate in a very natural and (if not for the unpopularity of Biden running again, obscuring the view) very foreseeable way. To put it crudely, Americans “blew off steam” electing Trump and during his presidency, and now they are looking for something new.
source: Flickr
So, when Walz talks about a “just plain weird” Trump, his words mean something different than when Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert ridiculed the Republican nominee in 2016, pointing out that he is not very eloquent, wears spray tan and a toupee, or that he writes comically bad tweets. Now the weirdness of Trump in the eyes of Americans is that he alone has not grown out of it, not evolved in any way. So Walz’s remarks about how “weird” Trump and Vance are, communicate that it is strange that even though both the world and the American mentality have changed drastically, Trump still beats the same drum, like an illusionist who performs the same trick even though the whole the audience has learned their secret a while ago. Vance is insulted for a similar reason not so much as Trump but as Trump’s voters are. The Republican candidate for vice president is a grotesque example of a white boy careerist fanatic who would best like to work in a large consulting company so that he can afford to wear suits a couple sizes too small and have long conversations about how “crypto is the future” and that “the world has gone crazy” because trans people are gaining some marginal rights. Such a person is weird. In all this, his looking up to Donald Trump, who chose Vance because Trump’s son pulled the strings, is cringey. And this context allows Walz and Harris to communicate so much with such simple a word as “weird.”
But the success of Harris’ campaign isn’t just about Americans “growing out of Trump,” which is a difficult phenomenon to measure or prove. It was Trump himself who helped radicalize the Republican Party, consolidating the mentality of conspiracy theories, constant culture wars, and hate-driven rhetoric towards immigrants and LGBTQ+ people into the radical MAGA movement. Thus, the Republicans decided to continue waging the culture war, instead of returning to their natural territory of saying that Americans don’t care about cultural issues and that only the economy matters. Besides, Trump’s entourage finally seems to understand that he needs to change the narrative. As I am writing this article, I am listening live to the Republican candidate’s news conference on inflation, allegedly caused by Kamala Harris, and how she and Biden have “ruined the American economy.”7
On cultural issues, conservatives always lose in the end. The world moves forward. But today’s success of the Democrats also comes at the cost of years of tragic mistakes. A good example is immigration, where Democrats have long tried (and to some extent still are) to beat Republicans at their own game by hijacking the latter’s narrative and adopting tough anti-immigration policies rather than pointing out the falsehood of anti-immigrant hysteria. For example, the fact that in the United States in 2024 there were not thousands of murders committed by illegal immigrants, as Republicans claim8 – but 23.9
The Democrats’ current use of the word “weird” is therefore making use of an opportunity given to them by Republicans who, too absorbed in radical right-wing Trump mania, indulged in speculations that, while rewarded in the far-right circles, had little to do with the lives of an average American. Proto-fascist Plan 2025 (a plan written by conservative circles in the United States to deprive Americans of many civil liberties and to fill state administration positions with right-wing loyalists),10 speculations about how children in American schools are allegedly forced to undergo sex-change procedures, that there exists a Democrat-Hollywood-Illuminati-style elite, with the Clintons, Obama and George Soros presiding, and that they plan to replace white (“real”) Americans with people of color (the so-called “Great Replacement Theory”), left the concept ” normality” in the middle of the field, to be easily taken over by the Democrats.
It also seems that political analysts, for whom the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 was a shock undermining their most fundamental beliefs, and who then added Trump’s victory to the wave of right-wing populism flooding Europe, were to some extent wrong. Yes, negative emotions such as fear and hatred motivate voters. Scaring people with immigrants who want to get to “our” country only to rob it/kill its inhabitants/take their jobs, worked in the United States and elsewhere (in Poland, for instance) in 2015, in 2016, in 2020, and will probably work a few more times. People really do often vote on negative emotions. However, equally, people don’t want to vote like that. They prefer to vote in favor of something. As Tomasz Zalewski writes in the Polityka magazine11: “Smiling, jovial, introducing himself as a Bruce Springsteen fan and ironically calling Trumpists “weird” [Tim Walz] contrasts with somber Republican leaders warning voters of the apocalypse if their opponents win.” Voters are looking for an exciting vision of the future, of change, for a promise or at least a hint that everything will be okay. At the moment, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, even if without too many details, can convince Americans that this is what the future will be like. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance can’t.
source: Flickr
1 Megan Brennan, Steady 54% of Americans Identify as Middle Class, Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/645281/steady-americans-identify-middle-class.aspx#:~:text=Still%2C%20despite%20persistently%20high%20inflation,U.S.%20adults’%20social%20class%20identification [17/08/2024]
2 Harris tells pro-Palestine protesters ‘now is time for ceasefire’ in Gaza, Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/10/harris-tells-pro-palestine-protesters-now-is-time-for-ceasefire-in-gaza [17/08/2024]
3 Kamala Harris and Tim Walz on tacos, music, and the future of America, Kamala Harris’ Official YouTube Channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkwZ_A49hb8 [17/08/2024]
4 Russ Latino, Mind Your Own Damn Business, Magnolia Tribune, https://magnoliatribune.com/2024/08/11/mind-your-own-damn-business/ [15/08/2024]
5 Meg Kinnard, Why Harris and Democrats keep calling Trump and Vance ‘weird’, Associated Press, https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-trump-vance-weird-c54d506d1f533ee7aa455f7b500322c5 [15/08/2024]
6 Criminal Noncitizen Statistics, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/criminal-noncitizen-statistics [15/08/2024]
7 Tomasz Zalewski, “Good Uncle Tim”, Policy No. 34 (3477), Warsaw, 13/08/2024, p. 59
8 Stephen Collinson, Trump’s fury over Harris’ switch with Biden is increasingly driving his campaign, CNN, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/16/politics/trump-fury-harris-switch-campaign-analysis/index.html [16/08/2024]
9 Donald Devine et. to the, “CENTRAL PERSONNEL AGENCIES: MANAGING THE BUREAUCRACY”, Mandate for Leadership 2025, Paul Dans, Stephen Groves (eds.) https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-03.pdf [16/08/2024]
10 At the time of writing this article – 17/08/2024
11 Guardian Staff, John Oliver on Republican ‘migrant crime’ rhetoric: ‘relentless, bad-faith fearmongering’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/article/2024/jul/22/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-republicans [17/08/2024]
The background picture source: ecfr.eu
