GOP v. Democrat - Competing Visions for America

With the Democrat National Convention over, Americans are being presented with two starkly different visions for America's future.  The Trump/Vance ticket offers darkness, endless grievance, a constant looking towards the past, including racial division and the elimination of civil rights to those who do not embrace the MAGA agenda of taking the country backward in time (to a time when blacks are to be subordinate, gays invisible, and women's rights were restricted) and a framing the purpose of government principally to be maintaining white "Christian" supremacy.  In sharp contrast, the Harris/Walz ticket looks to the future and offers inclusion to all and the promotion of a kind of freedom that allows citizens to choose whatever culture they like, as long as they are law abiding and respect the Constitution. In some ways Harris' surge seems driven by those who want this more expansive future and who also cringe at the very thought of returning to some of the worse bigotry and discrimination from the nation's past, hence the phrase "we are not going back."   A column in the Washington Post looks at this sharp contrast through the two tickets' vice presidential candidates.   Here are excerpts:

You can see why Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate, and why Democrats have fallen in love with him. The guy delivers a stemwinder in the tradition of the great plains populists, full of passion and humor and plain-spoken defiance.

But let me tell you something: Nobody delivers a speech that good unless he’s got a clear intellectual argument behind it and a burning conviction that he’s right. And that’s why the contrast between Walz and JD Vance might be the most interesting of the campaign.

We’ve seen Donald Trump meander and contradict his way through endless stretches at a lectern. You’ll soon see Harris capably work her way through an amalgamation of platitudes and applause lines.

But in the contrasting rhetoric of Walz and Vance, in particular, we get a much sharper sense of what’s really being litigated in this election: two sharply contrasting views of what being American actually means.

The most important passage in Vance’s convention speech last month was the one where he described the country as something physical, rather than an abstraction. “America is not just an idea,” Vance said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation.”

Literally speaking, this is not debatable . . . . But Vance isn’t being literal. He is articulating the central idea that animates all forms of nationalism (including the white variety), as well as the Trump movement. He is arguing that there is such thing as a common American culture, with its own language (English), its own religious ethos (Judeo-Christian) and its own concept of family (heterosexual, with naturally conceived children).

[I]n his view of America, the outsider becomes American by adopting a set of cultural norms — living here “on our terms,” as he put it in his speech. In this way, he sees America as no different, really, from France or Russia or any other country with common ethnic heritage. The price of admission is cultural conformity.

What Walz articulates — about as clearly as anyone has in the party since Barack Obama arrived on the scene 20 years ago — is a competing view that says, no, actually America is very much an idea. Alone among nations, we have from the very start been a collection of immigrants and outsiders, bound together not by any common origin or culture, but rather by a common set of laws and values and institutions — what Abraham Lincoln called our “political religion.”

In the America Walz described in his convention speech, it doesn’t matter what language you speak at home or what god (if any) you worship, or whether you have kids (naturally or otherwise). Because as long as you believe in the American promise of liberty and adhere to its laws, you’re just as American as anyone else, and anybody who doesn’t like it should “mind their own damn business.”

Community, in Walz’s telling, isn’t defined by somebody’s idea of cultural norms, but rather by your connection to your neighbors. If you’re willing to help out with a stranded car or a bake sale, then he doesn’t care if you’re an atheist or a cat-owner (or, God forbid, both).

[T]his is a very big disagreement, and I would argue that it’s more important than any one policy having to do with the price of groceries or the tax code. It is an argument that will shape the way we govern ourselves for years to come — whether we conceive of American liberty as something that exists chiefly to protect White, Christian Americans from having their culture trampled, or whether we understand liberty to mean the freedom to choose whatever culture you like, as long as you respect the Constitution while you do it.

I come down firmly on the Harris-Walz side here. My own sense is that historians in the distant future will place the Trump movement among periodic eruptions in our history of the basest kind of nativism — Know-Nothings, the Immigration Restriction League, the Japanese American internment, Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. How significant this eruption will be in that continuum depends, I suppose, on whether Trump is elected a second time.