Our friends at 270 Reasons are gathering a polyphonic orchestra of brilliant writers, teachers, doctors, filmmakers, artists, and citizens of all kinds to weigh in about their plans to vote this November. These opinion essays run the gamut from advocacy for basic human rights to acutely personal mini-manifestoes. Read the rest over at 270 Reasons.
There’s always a moment in the writing of a short story when things get difficult. The story presents the writer with an apparently insoluble problem. It’s natural to feel, at such a moment: Oh, crap, my story has a problem, let me find a better one, one without any problems.
Does the country have problems? Hoo boy. (To my mind, these include climate change, corporate domination, economic disparity, extreme partisanship, the massive neurological effects of social media and, just for good measure, the dehumanization of everyday interactions by profit-maximizing technology.)
When I decide how to cast my vote, I’m mostly thinking about different modes of problem-solving. And here, in 2024, we’re presented with two very different models.
The MAGA side takes a defeatist, negative, fearful approach. We’re past the point of no return, all power is rotten, no one is to be trusted. It highlights false notions (carnage, the evil migrant, the American-hating left). It views America as a failed project, a dead end, corrupt from within, and so forth. (It’s the equivalent of a writer storming around his study, cursing his story, his pens, his chair, the entire English language, etc.: if only he had a different life/pen/chair/study/language, he could finally get something done.) Its leader comes from a place of extreme, distorting privilege; he’s been rich and famous his entire adult life and seems to have had zero contact with anything resembling a real, quotidian, American life. And, for all his good luck, he’s angry, always angry at somebody.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, on the other hand, represent another view: that our country is fundamentally sound and does not need to be torn down or destroyed from within. It’s flawed, but good. It has a solid conceptual architecture. With hard work and discernment and compassion, we could, finally, convert it into that “more perfect union,” and fulfill the egalitarian, equalitarian goals of its founders’ views at their best.
This approach considers the many blessings and strengths already in place here and honors the extreme fragility of any working system. The Harris-Walz view is, I’d say, “hopeful,” in that it believes we can achieve, by positive means, positive outcomes. It’s in touch with reality and isn’t afraid of it. It sees mere negation as a fundamentally juvenile approach, a form of tantrum-throwing, primarily egoistic; the person who longs to negate, without any positive plan to improve things—without an agenda that is not all and only about negating the other side—is not involved in a community venture, but a private one—in this case, one that has come to seem increasingly petty and vengeful.
Hope, as defined above, can also be an artistic tool; it’s really, in my experience, the only way to solve one of those difficult artistic problems mentioned above. The artist doesn’t flinch from that problem or deny it (or get angry about it, or afraid of it); rather, he tries to say to himself: “OK, the fact that I’m faced with a problem indicates the possibility of a thrilling solution. If the story has led me this far, it must have something good in mind for itself; my job is to be patient and bring to the project a loving, positive resolve, to believe in the story’s future, to say to it, ‘I know you can work and I’m going to give you all the time and energy you need.’”
This is what I mean when I say that the Harris-Walz movement is a hopeful one: it looks out at the world without undue fear and finds it workable, basically good, worthy of our attention. There’s fondness in this, as well, a feeling that, seen correctly, the country is full of more friends than enemies, or that it could be so.
I admire their positive energy, their humor, their honesty, the sense of happy realism that emanates from them. It seems strange to say, but I like the fact that they really seem to like our country; to be fond of and its people and its ideals. They convey, to me, a sense that our best days are ahead; that America, as a country and as a virtuous idea, is an ever-expanding idea, still being discovered, and that we all have a part to play in this.
George Saunders is the author of twelve books, including the Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.
Read more essays (with new ones added every day) at 270reasons.com.
The arguments here represent the opinion of the authors and not necessarily those of the McSweeney’s Literary Arts Fund.
