Donald Trump arrives for a campaign rally at Avflight at Cherry Capital Airport on Oct. 25 in Traverse City, Michigan (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).
We are not going back.
Kamala Harris’ campaign staffers slipped those words into the first speech she gave as the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency, after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race in July. It was a vow not to return to a Donald Trump presidency, and all the damage that could bring.
The line was something of a throwaway, but the audience liked it so Harris kept using it. Turns out the slogan was spot on, although not in the way she and her supporters intended.
We are not — at least in the foreseeable future — going back to political decency. Or a period of calm. Or guardrails.
We used to have those things. They are perhaps mythologized, but they did exist. Not so long ago a felony conviction, public displays of vulgarities and overt calls to murder political opponents and journalists would have been disqualifying for someone hoping to be president of the United States. A candidate’s character used to count at the ballot box.
But that was then and this is now and we are not going back.
The 2024 presidential election exposed an underbelly of American society that many of us don’t want to look at too closely. It is crawling with so-called influencers who openly glorify political violence, demean women, demonize immigrants and minority groups and whip up grievances.
Donald Trump and his team legitimized that underbelly. His victory over Harris brought it into the mainstream.
If the Republican nominee and soon-to-be U.S. president can sit on a stage with Tucker Carlson and fantasize about his adversary Liz Cheney having guns “trained on her face,” what’s to stop a Trump wanna-be from harassing a woman on the street or committing violence against a neighbor?
The guardrails have disappeared. And they’re not coming back.
I have, over the last 10 years or so, ceased believing in pendulum swings. That was a comforting notion in, say, the presidency of George W. Bush. The pendulum would reach its peak swing, and then political gravity would pull it back toward the center. We would have an election and things would be better.
If that theory ever worked in politics, it doesn’t anymore. The pendulum is spinning wildly in some chaotic hinterland. It is not drifting back to sanity.
For evidence of the broken pendulum, look no further than post-election Missouri.
Democrat Crystal Quade, a legislative leader and as good a candidate as you’ll find, could not convince national groups to provide the funds needed to run a statewide campaign.
She lost to Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican who felt obliged to reverse himself on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. Kehoe used to say that people needed to accept that Joe Biden had beaten Trump in that race. Then, faced with a competitive GOP primary for governor, he declared Biden’s win illegitimate and said he “should have never stepped foot in the Oval Office.”
For me, that abasement was the saddest moment of the campaign. Until election night, of course.
Missouri’s newly elected secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, wants to audit voter registration rolls, roll back early voting and crack down on public libraries.
The state’s attorney general, Andrew Bailey, just elected to his first full term, considers it his job to act as a back-up lawyer to Trump at the expense of Missouri taxpayers.
Both of the state’s U.S. senators have denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
Forget that old image of Missouri as the land of common sense, the home of plain-spoken Harry Truman from Independence. That Missouri is gone and it is not coming back.
In Missouri and in the United States, we have entered a new reality. And we are going to have to figure out how to live in it.
First of all, we do not have to accept nastiness, vulgarities and violence in the public space as normal. It is not OK to scapegoat and threaten your opponents or entire groups of people and we should say that.
We do not have to accept lies or a rewrite of history and denial of science. When Trump and his allies make false claims we should call them out. The right to free speech applies to all Americans, and now is our time to use it loudly.
At the same time, beware of dividing into opposing camps based on political preferences. I’m talking to you, my fellow Democrats and progressives. Clearly, we are outnumbered. Your neighbor with the Trump sign in the yard has a story, and it may be helpful down the road to learn what it is.
Harris, in her elegant concession speech last Wednesday, urged supporters to play the long game.
“Sometimes the fight takes a while,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we won’t win. The important thing is don’t ever give up. Don’t ever stop fighting to make the world a better place.”
Those lofty words in Harris’s final speech as the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee will come as cold comfort to many contemplating another Trump presidency.
But she was right in her first speech, only four months ago. We are not going back. The only way through this nightmare is forward.