Nevertheless I've been reflecting this week on the Trump victory in the States and what it means. What it means for the future, I cannot say, but it is obviously terrifying for the world. My heart goes out especially to trans people in the States as well as the Palestinian people. But I've been thinking about those campaigns and how they landed. Kamala Harris' campaign, and particularly the National Convention which had this message of JOY, seemed at the time to me deeply inappropriate against the backdrop of a genocide. I was listening to a This American Life episode following a Palestinian American at that convention, and how the leadership was trying to shut down any voice they had. The leadership wanted to keep the happy message up. In the cold light of this day it seems to me even more clear that the whole “happy” campaign was just serious gaslighting, not only for Palestinians, but for many Americans in general.
What Trump tapped into was this sense that SOMETHING IS WRONG. Something is wrong in our late capitalist society, it's making us suffer, and the economically bottom half of even the “richest” countries are financially struggling. Now Trump's solutions are wrong. But his message of “something is wrong, I'm going to fix it” worked. He won't. He's a liar and a con man and a fascist. But he's right that SOMETHING is wrong.
While the Harris campaign felt like more “Everything's fine. Happy happy happy!” Which was just gaslighting. We know everything's not fine. And people are more likely to vote for someone saying everything's not fine than someone saying everything is fine.
And this week I see memes saying, “We must get back on the horse, and keep fighting!” and I'm thinking this is kind of problematic too. It's not wrong as such, but it's been a matter of hours – can't we let people have an emotion for one damn minute before we have to rush to action?
I'm only talking as a fairly casual observer from another country observing American politics (so take my observations with whatever pinch of salt you want) but here's my broader point: emotions matter. Grief matters. And it's the denial of our feelings that gets us into trouble. The Harris campaign, in retrospect, was about people denying their feelings that something is wrong. It wasn't based on any authentically rooted sense of joy, but an artificial suppressing of bad feelings, a suppressing of feelings or grief and fear. Trump's campaign took those feelings and transmuted them to hate and anger, which of course isn't healthy, but at least he was taking them somewhere. The Harris campaign was emotional denialism.
I'm more and more convinced that our work for justice has to be rooted in emotional truth. Tell the truth. Something is wrong. And we're damn angry about it. And grieving. And depressed. And sad. We don't win through fake optimism. Walter Bruggemann is clear that the prophetic work is first telling the truth, then grieving for it, and only then getting to hope. You can't get to hope without doing the first two stages first. There's no shortcut to hope that doesn't run through grief. A grief that we allow to fully enter into us, right into the bones.
And so no, don't get back into the fight today. Don't strategise. Don't work harder. Just be f***ing sad. For one day at least, just be f***ing sad. There's no way to do this work without starting with our emotions and our bodies. Be sad and angry and however else you feel. And let's be sad together.
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