The biggest thing in sight and the first thing most people probably saw when they walked into the arena where Kamala Harris held a recent rally in Greensboro, N.C., was the word “FREEDOM” on a giant blue banner with block letters in white and giant stars and flags on either side.
Before 17,000 people so loud at times you couldn’t hear her say she was glad to be in Greensboro, Ms. Harris talked about “the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American,” which led right into the crowd chanting “U.S.A.”
This is what Ms. Harris asks crowds to chant at the end of her rally speeches, in good humor, almost like she too can’t believe this year’s turn of events. At each of these phrases, the crowd calls back “yes”: “Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America?”
Patriotic Americana has been Ms. Harris’s theme since she became the Democratic presidential nominee, from the flags waving at the convention to calling her running mate, Tim Walz, “coach.” There’s so much enthusiasm out there for Ms. Harris right now, and the place she’s chosen to direct it is in a patriotic swell that contains a harder message combining liberal ideas and a kind of conservatism that’s about preserving the American idea of the recent past.
In political patriotism there is sometimes an impulse to talk about America as the only place in the world that could have produced the candidate standing before you, where the candidate becomes a symbol of something greater. That can endear or repel listeners, depending on their disposition. Who knows whether these appeals ultimately work with voters, but that’s not the way this has really been with Ms. Harris. Virtually nothing about the freedom message has to do with her; it’s more like “freedom” is the collective condition and experience of the country, to be repaired or damaged, and the cheerful patriotic packaging an extension of her own often upbeat personality.
In Greensboro, between her arrival on and exit from the stage (to Beyoncé’s “Freedom”), the “freedom” message could sound darker. The riff ultimately touched on a mix of rights (like voting and L.G.B.T.Q.) and standard-of-living issues (like gun violence and clean air) as well as, centrally, abortion. “Ours is a fight for freedom, like the fundamental freedom of a woman to be able to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said to a particularly explosive crowd response.
Ms. Harris ticked through abortion bans across the South, calling the ones that lacked exceptions “immoral” before centering again the freedom of the individual: “Let us agree, one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that” — she started, then practically shouted the words “the government,” accentuated with almost a throwing motion — “should not be telling her what to do with her body.”
This section of Ms. Harris’s speech also focused on freedom, and the way she talks about Mr. Trump being “unfit” for the Oval Office feels, in its own way, about the precarity of the moment — a reinterpretation of President Biden’s fundamental message about the solemn question of American character and government. Mr. Biden’s campaign advisers described, earlier this year, their own view of the 2024 election as one about “freedom,” outlining many of the same issues that Ms. Harris now does. But the Biden message tended to emphasize democracy and “the soul of America” as themes. “Under Joe Biden, the sun will not set on this flag,” a narrator said in an illustrative ad. Mr. Biden is pictured in the Oval Office as the narrator says, “American democracy will not break.”
In both Mr. Biden’s framework and Ms. Harris’s, though, America in the recent past was decent, or at the very least a highly promising start, the product of good ideals and a lot of difficult civil rights work in places like Greensboro. Freedom defined this way — from abortion rights to the peaceful transfer of power — can be a norm one day and gone the next, and with it the rest of what people understood about the country, leaving people who value stability at sea and those whose rights are lost in a worse place from some earlier time.
One of the bigger divides in American politics right now seems to rest on how people understand the present and recent past: Is the country in dire straits, at the tipping point of the end of an empire — or not? Is America how it is now or how it was recently something we need to preserve — or something to smash up?
These kinds of questions are not necessarily partisan, or not exactly. Two, let’s say, conservative-minded people who might have both voted for Mitt Romney 12 years ago can diverge sharply on Mr. Trump, just around the question of whether the country’s edging into apocalypse or if he’s the answer, as he has made himself out to be so often. And so much of the last decade has been about re-examining American history, ideals, norms and the time between Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama’s presidencies in earnest and often painful ways.
Earlier this summer, my colleague Ezra Klein explored this question about whether the Democrats could reclaim freedom as a message, and the difference between negative freedoms (what the government can’t tell you to do) and positive freedoms (what you need to flourish), which Ms. Harris’s freedom framework has both of, but with an emphasis on what the government can’t tell you to do (often a Republican message, though this one’s about a longstanding Democratic priority in abortion rights).
Ms. Harris can sound retro Republican in certain ways. At the Democratic National Convention and on the debate stage, Ms. Harris talked approvingly about our “lethal” fighting force (which sounds like something a Republican would say in the 2000s). But, as Mr. Klein noted, there’s been a major change on the right in the Trump era, particularly when seen through the lens of JD Vance and the post-liberal set of intellectuals with whom he’s associated, who are much more skeptical of libertarian conceptions of individualism and talk much more about using the power of the state for their own conception of the common good.
The last decade hasn’t been easy, especially parts of the last five years, so it’s unsurprisingly a moment in which people say they want dramatic change. But, there’s tension with that idea as well: In the post-Dobbs, post-Jan. 6 world of violence and fast-moving technological change, the idea that things could change dramatically and for the worse maybe seems a lot more alive, more real.
The post Kamala Harris’s Ideas About Patriotism appeared first on New York Times.
