Alan Zendell, August 19, 2024

Today might have been very different if President Joe Biden hadn’t had the class and dignity to step aside. Four weeks ago, the 2024 election was shaping up to look like the 1980 election. Back then, a Democratic president who had been elected because Watergate, Vietnam, and the new energy reality caused by the Arab oil embargo had made America nostalgic for a progressive re-awakening and the youthful exuberance of John F. Kennedy. I was seventeen in 1960, an impressionable age, a year I divided between Brooklyn Tech High School and Columbia University. It was a heady time to be approaching adulthood made more so by the sheer joy Kennedy had brought back to politics.

The Democrats tried to revive that feeling with someone who was a nuclear engineer, peanut farmer, and Governor of Georgia. No more scowling Richard Nixon or body bags, or presidents for whom staying in power was more important than the rule of law and our Constitution. And while Gerald Ford was a genuine Conservative and a decent man who we needed to steer the ship while we recovered from the trauma of a horrible war and a genuine threat to our democracy, in 1976, Jimmy Carter seemed like someone who could get us back on track as the undisputed leader of the free world.

Too bad It didn’t turn out that way. As president, Carter’s first official act was signing the Hyde Amendment. Less than five years after Rowe v. Wade, the amendment assured that no federal funds would ever be used to pay for abortions. With a looming recession, serious drug problems and major cities looking at bankruptcy, and the highest interest rates we’d even known, Carter’s presidency was dealt a fatal blow when our puppet dictator, the Shah of Iran was overthrown by radical Muslim Ayotollahs who attacked and occupied the American embassy in Tehran – all of which resulted in the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Grover Norquist.

They ushered in the era of supply side economics and the beginning of a backward-looking political philosophy that sought to reverse the progressive gains of the New Deal and create an oligarchy of billionaires. That gave birth to the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus, which masqueraded as attempts to return to fiscal conservatism, but were really ideologies based on racism, misogyny, and greed. That brought us divisiveness, palpable anger and hate, and the realization that America wasn’t the country we thought it was. It couldn’t be if it produced a monster like Donald Trump. It couldn’t be if it revealed that at least a third of us preferred an immoral, power-mad narcissist who threatened to disembowel the institutions and values that America was based on.

America and the world have been in shock for nine years. Friends and families became divided, and the mood in our country went steadily downhill. COVID was part of that, but Trump’s incompetence, the deaths of more than a million Americans and his clear intent to remain in power even at the cost of destroying our democracy elevated Joe Biden to the presidency. Biden saved us from the worst economic consequences of COVID and shepherded the strongest recovery of any major nation, included a three-year struggle to control the inflation that resulted from need to shut down our economy during COVID and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that spiked energy prices.

Biden brought back a sense of cautious optimism, but as the MAGA movement prepared its final assault on democracy and our Constitution, and Biden’s age and apparent loss of cognitive function caused Americans to lose confidence in his ability to serve a second term, the despair we felt in 2016 as Hillary Clinton was brought down by a barrage of hate and unbridled attacks based on Trump’s lies and power-crazy fantasies returned.

That’s where we were four months ago. But while the Republicans fell on their swords for Donald Trump, despite the obvious fact that he has destroyed their party and tarnished its proud history, the Democrats swallowed a bitter bill and did what was necessary. A month ago, I didn’t believe Kamala Harris had what it took to bring us back, but her first public appearance as candidate for president in Atlanta convinced me. She is the Hegelian hero of our time. Fighting the glass ceiling that all women have to fight and struggling against the double-whammy of racism and xenophobia that her biracial heritage arouses in some of us, she transformed the mood of America.

Ms. Harris has brought joy back. Trump used to hold massive rallies, filling stadia with angry people looking for a scapegoat for their own problems. Now it’s Harris who fills stadia, but her crowds are joyous. They rock and roll and sing and dance. She has already inspired enough of us that she now has the edge for November, and her momentum is still growing as her positive presence shines a harsh light on the reality of the nasty old man she’s running against.

I love that the entertainment world is out in force in support of her. Trump mocks her because her convention will likely be a joyous songfest and celebration. Voting for someone because Beyonce and George Clooney love her is absurd, but if they can elevate the mood of the country and re-enable its aspirations, I’m completely on board with it. I have no idea how the Democrats are choreographing the Convention, but for me, the perfect climax would be Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ushered on stage by the Chicgo Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy from his triumphant Ninth Symphony.