Okay, so if we take it as a given that Trump’s supporters are largely, even mostly racists, how does that allow us to ‘start moving forward’?

I’m honestly less and less sure that pointing fingers, even for good reason, is politically useful at all. To those who are already convinced, it seems heroic, sure. But for those who aren’t? All it does is put them on the defensive and entrench their position.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t call out racism when we see it, because we should. The left needs to call out injustice, because the right isn’t about to do it. But like, that can’t be the entirety of our political strategy. It doesn’t work. It makes us look preachy and more importantly it puts the impetus for us getting our goals accomplished on racists.

When we’re focusing all our political energy on decrying the wrongness of the right, our visible political identity becomes just that: criticism. That’s not what wins elections. If anything, it signals to the racists on the right that this is a rallying point for them, and it gives them the opportunity to turn to others who tend to lean Republican and say, “See what monsters they think you are? We know what you’re really like.”

If we want to win the election, we need positive energy. We need to motivate our own base, and we need to give people on the fringes of our ideologies something that draws them in rather than something that makes them feel defensive. That doesn’t mean we can’t also call out injustice, but we have to do it with empowering language, not with language that shifts power to those we see as an obstacle.

This is why the Obama campaign’s “Yes We Can” slogan was so effective. It allowed Obama to have a platform for addressing the obstacles he wanted to direct attention at, but it did it in a way that highlighted Democratic agency rather than simply saying “this is wrong”. Each time one of these problems was touched on, he could again touch back on the positive energy of “Yes We Can” and it energized crowds and voters rather than making them feel bored and doomed.

“Or We’re Fucked” isn’t a very good campaign slogan, as we’ve seen with Biden. Harris has a chance to move away from that, and seems to be doing so. You can already feel the power shifting, because her campaign uses her personal confidence and magnetism to show voters that she can handle it. Yes, we have problems, but they’re not going to crack her armor and make her stop expressing joy. Yes, the right is sinister, but we don’t have to obsess over it. We can call them weird and move on with our actual work, while building confidence that we have the ability to get it done.

Dress for the job that you want.

If you want to get something done, you’re a lot better off if you know that you can do it. We need to know that the injustices of the right are just some ill-tempered old fogies spouting off about a time that’s passed as they slowly fade away. We need to know that their weirdness is ultimately going to lose.

Their threat is real, to be sure, but if we focus on the threat and give it power, we give ourselves nothing. We need to build that power inward, and for that we need energy that focuses on our own confidence in our ability to get things done.

Harris and Walz seem to know this, which is a great sign. Once they’re in, we can put their feet to the fire on taking care of this stuff, but just pointing at the Republicans and identifying the reasons they’re a large ideologically motivated threat just makes the optics seem more and more hopeless for us and more and more like the wild thrashing of a dying prey animal to the right.

If we focus on our goals regardless of any crazy bullshit they run up their flagpoles, we get to pick the focus. If we let ourselves be led about with patter and distracting hand-waving, we may well miss the plot.

Are a lot of Republicans racist? Obviously. Is laser focusing on it to the point of in-fighting going to give us the ability to render their racism irrelevant to public policy? I’m skeptical.