Aug 9, 2024 7 min read

Love Is the Message, Or Why Harris and Walz are Winning

Joe Lamberti

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Here’s a weekend read from me, love is the message or why Harris and Walz are winningHi. How’s everyone? Today I want to talk to you about…

Why Harris and Walz are winning the American Presidential election. And probably will win it, in the end, if. If…what? Let’s be more precise about what’s happening right now. Tremendous swings in polls of all kinds. Among precisely the people who will make the crucial difference. Let me sum that up another way.

America’s in a kind of mania over Harris and Walz. I mean that formally, psychologically. There’s a sense of collective euphoria, which is what a mania is. So where does it come from? How did this happen? And why does Trump seem…beaten?

Harris and Walz are making Americans feel loved. I explained their success last time as “teaching people how to hope,” not as in mouthing words of hope, but being hopeful, allowing people to be that way, modeling that way of being for people. And all that comes from…

In Harris and Walz, you get the sense that you might be unconditionally loved. That is why they’re seen as Mom and Dad by America, particularly its young people, who’ll openly call them that, euphorically. Now, some on the left will find that laughable, so let me shade it in: they give people the possibility, at least, of some senses of unconditional love.

And that is what parents do for us, the good kind.

Now contrast that with Trump. What does he offer? He makes people feel loved, too. But conditionally. On the conditions of guilt, shame, fear, and rage. Not in the way of good parents. In the way of abusive, neglecting, narcissistic parents. Who, of course, produce children that don’t mature in healthy ways, and become capable, themselves, of loving.

Harris and Walz offer us a more transcendent vision, feeling, sense, of being loved. It transcends Trump’s twisted, damaged, damaging love of a demagogue. It operates at a higher level.

That is why it’s more powerful. That’s why Trump seems beaten. Because in truth, he can’t compete with this.

Now let me try to explain all that to you, so it makes a bit more sense.

The question’s often asked: do we love our country? But that’s not really so much the question. A better one is: do we feel loved by our countries?

And the answer to that, these days, is dubious.

Do Americans feel loved by America? Or do they feel…neglected? Ignored? Maybe even abandoned?

I’ve told you my story before, but let me tell you a bit of it again, because here, it illuminates what I mean. I grew up as a disabled brown kid. The light can kill me. Imagine being that kid in America. I was relentlessly abused, every single day. I couldn’t walk down the street without being beaten. Couldn’t go from class to class without being punched, kicked, attacked. The neighbors would laugh in approval. The teachers would smile and egg it all on.

I understood, very fast, that America hated me. It didn’t want me to exist. But then I understood something even more chilling. My tormentors and abusers felt exactly the same way. And that’s why they directed their rage and hatred at me.

Nobody much felt loved by America. And that was a problem I couldn’t solve. I understood, even way back then, that it would take a generation of leaders to fix this problem, by offering Americans the sense of being loved that they needed, but didn’t have, to stanch all this. But I was a just a child.

And so I went from this brilliant kid, published in the newspaper before I was ten, to…flunking out of all my classes. And nobody could understand why. The reason was, I told the shrinks and therapists, when they asked me, that I had no hope. I understood that I would never have anything. A girlfriend, friends, relationships, opportunities, even my bodily autonomy. I was hopeless, and so all I had left was ending it.

A miracle happened then. I was accepted to college in…Canada. And Canada loved me. I could exist. Nobody was trying to kill me. I think of Canada, to this day, like a mother. I didn’t leave my dorm room for months, because I couldn’t grasp the idea of being treated as an equal. And she said to me, like a mother: “It’s OK, my child. Take your time. You are safe here.” Protected. Embraced. Held. Later, I’d be seen, known, understood, valued.

And suddenly, I had hope. I came back to life, fiercely. Snap—like that.

What’s the point of my story? So you cry for me? Nope. It’s to teach you how these things are related.

From love comes hope.

Love. It’s been the crux of my work. I taught the corporate world how to think about treating people in a more loving way, and I was successful at that. I tried to design an economy built around love and kindness, not greed and fear, and at that, my peers gaped in disbelief. On and on it goes. I write about it today, for the same reason I taught it in all these ways to all these institutions.

Love is the message. What is it? It’s the experience of being seen. Not ignored. Noticed. Not marginalized. Valued. Not dismissed. Understood. Not erased. Held. Not hated.

And in all these ways, we are failing to build a more loving world. That is why there is such a latent demand for being loved that when leaders appear, suddenly, who offer just that to us—the slenderest hint of unconditional love—euphoric manias erupt, like they are over Kamala and Tim.

That is how wounded and bereft and desperate we are. Without love, there is nothing. And our world has been heading that way too long.

So: love is the message. This is what the prophets and saints taught us. What the seers and sages said. And today, somehow, we’ve forgotten it. That “somehow” is all too obvious, especially in a society like America.

What happened to America? Hyper capitalism made it a brutal, desperate, lonely, scary place. Social bonds disintegrated. Earning a living became more and more difficult over time, as generations fell into downward mobility. Just existing became something contested, in artificial scarcity.

And with all this came the death of hope. Americans have grown incredibly pessimistic about the future of their society, their own futures, their kids’ futures. All that should tell us that something has gone badly wrong, and it does, but in a weak way, not the way it should. We speak of institutional failures and so forth, but the deeper problem is that America is bad at loving.

That is in a sense a conclusion that shouldn’t too hard to understand, given its brutal history of division, from segregation to slavery. And yet America’s different from most other modern societies. Canadian “niceness” is a way to say that it’s a far more loving society. In Europe, the cliche of people greeting one another with hugs and kisses is true, and different aspects of live are loved intensely, whether food or wine or togetherness or public life, and despite the far right’s inroads, Europe’s resisted disintegration in a way America hasn’t.

Love is power in this sense. This, too, is part of the message. Why does the left fail? I know that leftists will laugh at this essay. But their philosophy and ideology is all but dead in this world. And that is because it doesn’t offer people the mature love of the good parent, but something like guilt, shame, and rage, and in the end, it’s hard to distinguish from what the demagogues offer, and so this philosophy never builds a movement in the real world anymore. Until it learns to be loving again, it will be consigned to irrelevance, as it’s experiencing now.

We’re a world crying out to be loved. This is the fundamental lesson that this experience holds for many disciplines. My friend Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD, speaks of leadership as an act of love. In Harris and Walz’s example, we see just how powerful that idea is, because the manic, euphoric response is precisely to the feeling of being loved. For many people, like young people, for the very first time. For the rest, for the first time in a long time.

Love is mysterious, complex, difficult, subtle. None of the above means that Kamala or Tim are saints or prophets. They are human, just like you and I. But I want you to understand the messages of this moment, so let summarize and distill them. Our world is crying out to experience love, which capitalism, fascism, hatred, violence, brutality, genocide, war—have all stolen from us. They have robbed us of the most fundamental aspects of the human experience. So when leaders appears who, like good parents, can offer us even hints of unconditional love—manias erupt, so desperate are we. Love is power in this sense. It binds us together, for a reason.

Because we are all wounded. Frail. Mortal. Forever turning to dust. Ever children of the sun and moon. From eternity we come, and to eternity we return. In the interlude, the message has always been the same. Love. Now. While you can, as fiercely as you can, resisting all that pulls you away from it. To fail this test is to end up bereft, desperate, alone, like our world, and all that pain is piled atop the suffering already beating in the human heart.

We invented hell for a reason. To give us solace. Even the most fiery hell is a chance. At something, some slender thread of existence, some perhaps numinous form of redemption, a sense that God exists, and there’s some meaning to all this. But the truest hell of all is ever before us. It’s just life itself. The oceans of suffering that gather in the inches-wide space of each human heart. We will lose everyone we love. We will grow old and weak and frail. The world will not listen, learn, understand. The hurt of life is too terrible to bear, and so.

And so love is the message, my friends. It is our bond with the eternal. Our gift, our promise, and our destiny. This is our truth. And so when those come along us who remind us of it, after we’ve been imprisoned, for so long, in hatred’s prisons, we can scarcely remember who we are, why we’re here, what the point of us is—of course we erupt, joyously, with hope. We are becoming ourselves again, in the noblest sense, of redemption, the cross, the mighty ocean of love roaring through time, washing away the pain, holding us, whispering to us, of our unbreakable link with eternity. Hell is just us, Sartre said. And Camus responded: salvation is, too.

❤️ Don't forget...