Approaching from "Normality"

How did America, a majority racist nation in 2008, elect a black president? Obama was normal. Smart. Competent. Positive. American. He didn't run as The Black Guy; he ran as a smart, competent, positive American who happened to be black.

How did America go from snide jokes about "faggots" to sharply majority pro-gay rights (including marriage) in 20 years? The movement took the tack of "We just want to love who we love, like any American." Not "a gay thing"; an American thing. The message was delivered by boring, well-dressed, reasonable people, not dudes defiantly flaunting their nipple clamps.

Why will Harris/Walz overwhelmingly win the next election? Positivity, smartness, American. Per those other two outcomes, they'll make the other side look weird and messed up. Not via recipricol snideness and extremity, but approaching from the center. From normality. That's how you do it.

Can someone - anyone? - please absorb the lesson of all this? The moment a critical threshold groks this, that's when life on earth will shift into gear...if we haven't blown ourselves up first.


See my series "A Case Against Empowerment"

They canned Shapiro because 1. Better to push through one breakthrough at a time (you can't have a black lady and a Jew), and 2. The MAGAs are right that the extreme left would not rally around a Jew on the ticket. Both calculations are smart realpolitik, and I heartily agree with the choice.

That said, it makes me extremely edgy to watch Democrats fumf and mumble and hand-wave around this, because nothing's creepier than watching gentiles fumf and mumble and hand-wave around touchy Jewish questions (I know in my mitochondria where that leads). Also: try as I might, I can't muster a gram of excitement at the prospect of a VP who "LOOKS LIKE ME" or whatever the hell the phrase is. Given a choice between a Jewish candidate and a Methodist/Muslim/Catholic/Venusian candidate who's .1% more competent or electible, of course I'd pick the latter every damned time. Tribalism and identity politics are incompatible with the lesson we need to be absorbing right now.