The attempted assassination of one presidential candidate, the dramatic reshuffling of the opposing party’s ticket just over 100 days before the election date, and the almost miraculous support that appears to have amassed surrounding the new Democratic nominee. These are the events that have transformed what would otherwise have been an important yet largely predictable campaign race into one of if not the most surreal democratic processes in modern American history.
A more subtle yet potentially enduring development however, has been the shift in the Democratic political strategy for defining its own image, and the potential for this change to redefine the future of American political discourse.
Since Kamala Harris became the Democratic Presidential nominee, she has naturally been keen to criticise Donald Trump as a vile person and a threat to democracy. The January 6th insurrection and the overturning of Roe v. Wade have made it easy for Democrats to position themselves as the party of freedom, democracy, and ‘American values’. At the Democratic National Convention (DNC), Harris entered the stage for her speech to chants of ‘USA! USA!’, and emphatically proclaimed the ‘privilege and pride of being an American’, whereas her opponent has been repeating for almost a decade that ‘the American dream is dead’.
Republicans on the other hand don’t seem to know how to respond, partly because the case built against them is almost impossible to refute. As Kamala Harris delivered the final speech of the DNC, Trump was busy texting ‘WHERE’S HUNTER??’, in mocking reference to Joe Biden’s son and his felony convictions, as if fighting the ghost of the man he wishes he could run against.
This is the more visible political vantage point Democrats occupy at the moment, and the change is significant, given it has implicitly reappropriated the infamous Republican slogan of ‘Make America Great Again’, positioning themselves as the party of hope and optimism much like Obama in 2008.
Hidden under this shift, however, lies an even more fundamental change in the Democratic party’s culture towards fighting back against the Republican right. Shortly after Kamala Harris was embraced by the Democratic party as the presumptive presidential nominee, many prominent democratic figures began referring to Republicans and their policy positions as plain ‘weird’. This attack was most efficiently wielded by Harris’ Vice President pick and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who in his straightforward and astoundingly effective manner simply told Republicans to ‘mind your own damn business’ regarding abortion rights.
Whereas before, the liberal mantra was ‘when they go low, we go high’, it seems the Democrat defence to Republicans’ infantile mudslinging is to beat them at their own game, one which they appear to be winning.
This attack is so effective against the American right because it implicitly dismantles the image it has worked so hard to try and uphold; that they are the normal ones who live in reason, and it is the woke liberal left, with their ‘communist gender theory’ and ‘forced gender reassignment therapy’, who want to destroy America. However, this political tactic by American liberals is starting to flip the script on the contours of the American political culture struggle.
The truth is, Republican talking points are weird. JD Vance’s lamentations about senior female Democrats being a ‘bunch of childless cat-ladies’, and the plainly false basis for outrage surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif are just some recent examples of what the Republican campaign is concerned with above all. Tim Walz once again at the DNC highlighted how the Republican agenda is one that ‘nobody asked for’, and almost proving the Democratic criticisms in real time, Trump held his own gathering in Arizona on the last day of the DNC, wherein he read out in meticulous detail a list of gruesome violent crimes done to young girls by illegal immigrants in the US, as if relishing the process.
This is an important development in the struggle between Democrats and Republicans for the status quo. Already, it seems, Democrats have found it very easy to position themselves as the protectors of freedom and ‘American values’ in response to blatant authoritarian tendencies within the Republican campaign. In addition, this secondary shift in Democratic political manoeuvring has the potential to reconfigure the ‘normal’ in American politics and the broader cultural landscape. Perhaps then progress can be made towards policy that impacts peoples lives, as opposed to being distracted by whatever Tucker Carlson thinks is important.
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