Katy Waldman writing in the New Yorker
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There’s even a hint of caregiving in the left’s language. Weird is the sort of word a parent might use to wave away a child’s anxiety—“A monster in the closet would be pretty weird, huh?” It’s a way of acknowledging a fear without assigning it too much power. And it’s a form of containment. There’s a sense of quarantining this baffling political weirdness away from the rest of the country, not in anything so crazy as a physical structure—no need for that—but simply in a word, a gust of air, some sound attached. The wager of “weird” is that Americans of all stripes have been longing for de-escalation, a cooling hand on their brow, and that they’ll welcome a chance to distance themselves from the perceived fringe. Biden’s Presidency may have offered a measure of stability and sanity to those reeling from the unreality of the Trump years, but his reëlection campaign did not. The country seemed to be sleepwalking toward November as Trump’s rhetoric darkened and the Democratic establishment dismissed clear evidence of their candidate’s decline. As in a nightmare, we all had rigor mortis and couldn’t open our mouths to protest when we were told that these two men represented the best our political system had to offer. Harris, when she moved to the top of the ticket, jolted many people back to life. The fear and confusion aren’t gone, but her candidacy diminishes those feelings, makes them seem silly and insignificant. By running Harris, Democrats are signalling that they refuse to dwell in denial; and, therefore, that they refuse to fight maga on its own fantastical turf. If she wins, the country has a shot at waking up from an extremely weird dream.
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