David French writes: “There is a difference between beating a candidate and sidelining a movement…I believe that fear may be sufficient to beat Trump, but only joy can push MAGA back to the periphery of American life.” I hope he is right.
Here is a taste of his recent piece at The New York Times:
I’d like to offer a theory. Partisans aren’t really shifting their mood, but the exhausted majority of Americans is, and right now the Harris campaign is much closer than Trump’s to capturing their desires and reflecting that mood.
The term “exhausted majority” comes from More in Common’s seminal “Hidden Tribes” survey of American life. I’ve written about this study a number of times, in part because it describes better than any other survey I’ve seen the fundamental cultural reality of American division — most of us really don’t like it. While the partisan 33 percent of America is engaged in the political equivalent of trench warfare, the exhausted 67 percent are tired of polarization, feel forgotten by the political parties and long for some degree of compromise.
For most of the last nine years, the polarized wings have tried to reach these exhausted and alienated voters largely by grabbing them by the lapels and demanding that they wake up to the imminent collapse of the American republic. The messages have been relentless: Trump will destroy American democracy; Joe Biden will make America Marxist.
What’s even more frustrating to partisans is that many of these exhausted Americans are so alienated that they’re often utterly indifferent to the merits of the arguments themselves. It’s almost beside the point that there’s infinitely more evidence of Trump’s threat to democracy than there is of Biden’s Marxism. Rather than adjudicating, say, Trump’s continued claims that the 2020 election was stolen, many members of the exhausted majority look at the battle over the vote and don’t think, “Why won’t Trump stop lying” and instead say to themselves, “When will they both just shut up?”
If the two parties continue on this path, a grim fight between two apocalyptic parties’ visions could result in an election outcome — in either direction — that doesn’t alter the fundamental political realities of American life.
But there’s another potential outcome. If the national mood is shifting and if Harris and Tim Walz can maintain their happy warrior posture, then we could see meaningful political change. The era of the snarl could be at an end, and MAGA is nothing without its snarl.
I’m nervous about offering an optimistic take on American politics. Optimism can age very poorly, very quickly — and this idea might age just as poorly as the thought after the assassination attempt against Trump that he might have changed, to have become a bit more reflective and humane after his brush with death.
But I’m optimistic nonetheless. Joy alone isn’t sufficient to defeat Trump. The best approach combines joy with tenacity and an appealing set of policies. But it’s plain, to me at least, that Harris’s joy seems to have caught the Trump campaign off guard. Even worse, Trump simply can’t pivot to match the spirit of the moment. He’s too mired in his own grievances and rage. He says he’s “very angry” at Harris. He says he’s “entitled to personal attacks.” So, no, MAGA can’t answer a smile with a smile. It can only answer with a snarl.
Read the entire piece here.