President Joe Biden is out of the 2024 race, and Vice President Kamala Harris is angling to guide her party’s ticket. In the surge of interest in her revised candidacy this past week, online attention has focused on two of her turns of phrase. One is a line Harris has apparently been repeating for a few years, returning to it so often that a four-minute clip of her saying it dozens of times is trending on social media.
That line—a call to check and work toward “what might be, unburdened by what has been”—has been widely placed in tension with the opposite phrase by which Harris, quoting her mother, scoffs at those that “think [they] just fell out of a coconut tree.” No, she says, “You exist within the context of all by which you reside and what got here before you.”
Such a tension would be interesting—if it existed. It’d suggest a thoughtful balancing of progressive and conservative impulses, of aspiration for benevolent advancement and respect for clever tradition, of acknowledgment of the actual ills of history alongside a quest for the careful preservation of its goods.
Unfortunately, this supposed tension isn’t evidenced. The contradiction isn’t throughout the vice chairman’s pondering but across the partisan divide, as Harris looks prone to lead Democrats toward a simplistic condemnation of bygone times while the GOP just as simplistically embraces a rosy nostalgia that borders on being false.
Listen to the coconut comment in context, because the line itself suggests we must always, and also you’ll find Harris isn’t speaking about respect for prior generations or retrieval of the virtues of the past. She’s accounting for the evils and woes of history in order to raised progress toward equity in the longer term. Some young individuals are disadvantaged by lingering effects of the bad old days, Harris explains, which implies that to assist them, state programs may need to help their families and communities overcome their pasts.
That’s probably correct at the extent of practical guidance for members of the federal working group to whom Harris was speaking. But at a deeper level, it evinces the identical negative attitude toward history and tradition that the “unburdened” quote so efficiently communicates. There is not any thoughtful tension. There’s only a revolt against the trimmings of the past.
That posture would mark a major difference between Harris and her predecessor—for Biden’s age, long tenure in Washington, and predilection for reminiscing about his late father and son all incline him to a mixed view of history. Many of Biden’s policies are progressive, but his attitude toward the past is neither uniformly critical nor nostalgic.
(At the peak of 2020’s iconoclastic fervor, for instance, he distinguished “between monuments to Confederate leaders and statues of slave-owning former presidents comparable to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, saying the previous belong in museums while the latter ought to be protected.”)
More essential than her difference from a retiring Biden, though, is the contrast between Harris as a probable latest leader of the Democratic Party and her rivals across the aisle.
Always in recent many years the party more inclined to look longingly on the past, the Republican Party of our moment is all-in on nostalgia: for the primary Trump administration, for the Reagan years, for official prayer in public schools, for one-income households and company pensions, for traditional gender roles and a sturdy drug war and a time when “woke” was not in our lexicon. For the Fifties or the Eighteen Nineties or the 1770s or each time it was, exactly, that America was pure, powerful, and great. Make America Great Again is the slogan, in any case.
As constitutional scholar Yuval Levin observed in National Reviewearlier this 12 months, nostalgia politics was once bipartisan. Go back 10 or 15 years and you’ll find baby boomer Democrats reminiscing about middle-class mid-century Middle America just as fluently as their Republican counterparts.
“I grew up in an America that invested in its kids and built a robust middle class; that allowed thousands and thousands of kids to rise from poverty and establish secure lives,” Levin quotes Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren telling her party’s convention as recently as 2012.
That type of rhetoric has been in decline for 3 presidential election cycles—on the left, that’s. And if Harris clinches the Democratic nomination, we may expect her to maneuver her party further on to “what might be,” “unburdened” by the regressive “context of all by which you reside” and the oppression of “what got here before you.”
Nostalgia politics haven’t comparably declined on the suitable, nor does that appear likely as long as the GOP is helmed by former president Donald Trump and his literal or political heirs. And this strikes me as a significant issue.
It’s not an issue that a few of us could be generally pro-history and others pro-future, nor that a few of us would tend toward tradition and others toward progress. But that a few of us would have such revulsion for the current and others such revulsion for the past, and that polarization would push us to see this split as a matter of partisan loyalty and animosity––that history could be reduced to burden or meme––is problematic.
The tension (wrongly) perceived in those two lines from Harris is nice. It is a tension that ought to make sense to Christians, we who affirm the goodness of creation and latest creation, who understand humanity is each fallen and retentive of God’s image, who pass on the religion of our forebears while living with the implications of their sins (Deut. 6:5–9; 5:9–10).
We worship a God who doesn’t erase history nor spare us its pains, a few of them self-inflicted (Ps. 7:14–16)—but who does promise to redeem that suffering (Rom. 8:18–21), to bring justice and forgiveness (Ezek. 18), and to rescue us from sin, evil, and death itself (Heb. 2:14–15).
For us, to fall entirely on one side of a simplistic pro-history or anti-history split isn’t just divisive politicking. It’s bad anthropology and soteriology, evincing a naive and shallow understanding of how God made humans, how we spurned him, and the way he’s working in history to save lots of us. It leaves us unburdened, yes: unburdened by reality.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
