Why Kamala’s Joy is So Devastatingly Effective

Today we’re going to talk about Kamala. Her energy, which is a bit of a cop-out of a word, but we’ll come back to that. Joy. Why is it so devastatingly effective against Trump? And why has it caught fire across America?

Joy is Kamala’s proposition to Americans. And to understand why it matters so intensely we have to transcend American thinking for a moment, which tends to be focused on data, facts, figures, but not the soft stuff, the human stuff, emotions, moods, sentiments, “energy.” 

So what’s so radical about “joy”? Everything, in fact.

Stressed, Depressed, and Distressed in America

What strikes Americans after they’ve lived overseas for a while? Most will tell you that there’s something missing in America. Life can often feel joyless.

It’s not that Americans aren’t “happy,” and shortly we’re going to discuss the difference between happiness and joy. But it is that American life can be incredibly bleak, demoralizing, and scary. These days, “layoff influencers” have become a thing, and that’s pretty dystopian. Even if it’s good for people to share their trauma, the fact is that American life is deeply traumatic just as a condition of existing. From the school shootings to the medical debt to the lunch debt, which Tim Walz worked a second coaching job to help a student pay off.

Joy is in short supply in America. It has been for quite some time now. America became what wounded nations tend to become—angry, embittered, fractious. We use the word “divided,” but the mood of society isn’t that, it’s something darker. That’s not an “opinion,” by the way, these, too, are facts, about aa society’s sentiments. “Deaths of despair,” as the eminent economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call them, swept the working class. Levels of stress soared off the charts, and became distress. Over half of young people say the feel overwhelmed and numb. Happiness, it often seems, is a luxury reserved only for the rich.

In that context, a joyless society, where happiness itself is kept artificially scarce, perhaps you can begin to see why Kamala’s proposition of joy is so devastatingly powerful.

So now that I’ve given you some context, let’s really dig in, because this goes way, way deeper than you might yet imagine.

Joy is a Way of Being in the World

What is this “joy” thing that Kamala’s “about” itself really about? First of all, what she’s doing is what leaders do, at least if they want to be effective, which is modeling. She’s not telling people to be joyous, she’s being joyous.

The key word there, though, isn’t “joy,” It’s being. Joy is different from happiness in that it’s a way of being. Happiness is something closer to a mood, an emotion, a transient thing, a state which comes and goes. Joy is subtler. It’s how we choose to be in this world, which can be ugly, even obscene, sometimes frightening, and daunting. 

Joy is a mode of existence, and in that regard, Kamala’s saying something new to Americans. It’s OK to just…be…this way. Being joyful is something we should all have. Just as a condition of existing. She’s giving Americans license to be joyful, and again, the key word is be. Not just temporarily possess.

Let me sharpen that distinction. In America, it often seems that happiness is something you…buy. America’s a hyper capitalist, consumerist society, and endless messages tell people that the key to happiness is having more stuff than the next guy. As one of the guys who created modern marketing, this is a game of symbolic sacrifice and slaughter—I prove how powerful I am by symbolically killing you, which I do by having more stuff than you. I make you look small and less human. And I make you feel small and less human.

This is how happiness works in America, and did you notice the really bad thing in that equation? It’s zero-sum. That is, for me to be happy, someone else has to be unhappy.  When we orient a society’s model of happiness this way, we divide it into losers and winners, and winners are happy because losers are unhappy. I gain happiness in this sort of material sense, having more stuff, more dollars, more beach houses, more luxury goods, than you—and you also have less than me.

This approach to happiness is toxic for a society because happiness isn’t zero-sum. Not at all. The real thing is the opposite. I don’t have any less of it just because you’re happy—realistically, I have the ability to have more, because now there’s more to go around. And yet in America precisely the opposite is too often true—to be happy I have to feel that someone else has less, and if I can’t feel that I have more than someone, then what happiness do I really have?

Now, I’m not saying this to you theoretically. This approach doesn’t work in practice. America didn’t become a very happy society by taking this road. It became what we see today, a place that’s angry, stressed, and depressed. So this paradigm of happiness as a zero-sum game leads nowhere.

(Shattering) the Failed Paradigm of Unattainable Happiness

This is, on a deeper level still, Kamala’s idea of joy hits Americans so hard. She’s offering something completely different than the paradigm above, shattering it, in fact. She’s saying that everyone deserves to be joyous, that joy isn’t zero-sum, that just because you have some, doesn’t mean I have less. 

In fact, it works just the opposite way, which is where the nuance comes in. Joy is something, the subtext of her message says, that we all have together. When we come together, we are more capable of joy than when we’re alone, isolated, apart, fatalistic, resigned to being powerless, our fates in the hands of crackpots and extremists.

So joy is a collective sentiment. That if we choose together, we can make a way of being in the world for all of us. Not a temporary, transient, thing, that belongs only to some of us, as condition of having more power than others.

That’s actually a bit revolutionary as far as America goes.

Why? Because if you think hard about the above, the American paradigm of emotions is above all individualistic. That is, emotions are things that, like shoes, or houses, “belong” to each of us, alone, and therefore, we should also take “individual responsibility” for them. This is where ideas like “self-care” come from, and it’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that here’s a higher order of a paradigm, especially when it comes to emotion.

Not all emotions are individualistic, and the most powerful ones of all aren’t at all. So when Kamala’s saying joy is a thing we achieve together, and it’s a way of being in the world, she’s also challenging something incredibly deep, which is America’s individualistic paradigm of how we exist in the world and feel about it and ourselves.

What do I mean by all that?

The Feelings of Different Kinds of Societies

It’s not like this elsewhere.

When I go to Paris, what do I feel? What does anyone feel? Joy. Not just happiness, which is the more simplistic idea that we’ve discussed above. But a kind of joy that’s practically engraved into the ancient stones of the buildings, that pours through the streets. 

That doesn’t mean that I’m giddy. Rather, it means that Paris is a city that’s triumphant. Did you watch the Olympics? You could feel it in the immense, astonishing backdrops and venues. Paris shows us the triumph of the human spirit. Over so much. Feudalism, war, fascism. Through revolution, in strife, ripped apart, rebuilt. Paris teaches us the story of the human spirit overcoming the great troubles and traumas of the human journey, and that it can. 

Joy in this sense is a complex emotion. It’s not just “I’m happy because I bought a pair of nice shoes.” Great, nothing wrong with that. But joy goes deeper. Paris says to me: here you are, just a person. And in this place, you are liberated. From these old poisons. Here, you’re not a serf, not a slave, not a subhuman. Sit at the cafe. Watch the people go by. Join this oldest of modernity’s great ritual, which has a name, by the way, “the promenade.” This is what it means to be civilized, and in that, tinged with heartbreak, touched with grief, there’s a sense of deep, profound joy.

Just at being in this way.

And in Paris, and so many great European cities, this feeling spreads out through the avenues in great pulsations. People laugh, and kiss one another on the cheeks. Sometimes American pundits make fun of me for that example—but I hope I’m explaining why it’s so lethally meaningful. It says so much. There at the cafe I sit, write, think, and modernity flows through me. What would I have been a hundred years ago? Meat for the Nazi war machine. Two hundred? A servant. Five? A slave, if that. Now I can be. Who? Myself. Just myself. As we all can in these great and noble places. And in that becoming, there is a sense of unbinding joy.

This is what Kamala is beginning to teach Americans—maybe. I don’t know if she knows it, hell, probably she doesn’t. Her motivations are very different, and the place she comes from is, too.

Nonetheless, something deep is happening here, so now let me put my finger on it.

Kamala is teaching Americans it’s OK to be in a very different way than in a neoliberal capitalist society. The paradigm of emotions she’s modeling for Americans? It’s the feeling, much more so, of a social democracy.

Think of, for example, Canadian “niceness.” What’s that about? It’s not what Americans often think: rather it’s that in a social democracy like Canada, people are much happier, kinder, and gentler, because they can be. They don’t have to so cutthroat, ruthless, and brutal, which is stressful, depressing, and a game that many are going to have to lose.

What happens in these great European cities? This is the feeling of social democracy. This complex emotion I’ve tried to describe above. When people kiss each other on the streets, it’s not that it’s unalloyed happiness. Rather, it’s poignant because those streets have seen so much, from war to fascism to revolution, and finally, at last, people are free. And maybe that, too, is a gift that isn’t appreciated enough.

Social democracies have a very different palette of emotions than neoliberal capitalist societies. They’re happier. We know that for a fact, of course, think of the endless articles about how happy Scandinavia is. But that’s American-style research, again, which doesn’t really cut to the heart of the matter. They’re more complex emotionally, because people are freer to be, and so there’s this intense, rich palette of emotions, moods, sentiments, when you’re there, which is what Americans get a taste of on vacation, and envy intensely, often saying, that Europe “feels more alive.” It does, because in this existential sense, it is.

Modes of Social Evolution, or, How Progress Happens

And that’s absolutely crucial, as a form of social evolution, or, in American-ese, “progress.” Kamala’s criticized endlessly already by the pundit class for not offering enough “policy.” But these pundits, being American, don’t understand the above, because they haven’t lived it, and so they don’t see that in this way, which is way deeper, Kamala’s offering something far more explosive, meaningful, and transformative.

Because if we can make countries feel more advanced, more sophisticated, richer, in these ways of being alive, then of course, we can change them in terms of policy, much more easily. If we feel confident, sure of ourselves, if there’s steel in our bones, and fire in our hearts—what can stop us? Who can stop us? So you see, shattering the emotional paradigm of a society is absolutely crucial in moments like these, when nations feel stuck, paralyzed, and sometimes hopeless.

After all, that’s what the other side does so expertly. The fascists are very good at breaking the emotional paradigm of a society, teaching it fatalism, nihilism, rage, and learned helplessness. That’s their game, their whole schtick, and if they can break a society’s spirit that way, then they can do anything to it.

The mood of a society thus matters. But not just in the pollsters sense—do people feel good, right this minute?! Rather, in the sense of what they can feel. How they can be in the world, allow themselves to be, how they can feel collectively, and what they can feel collectively. All those things transcend policy, because they come far, far prior to it, limiting its possibilities, and setting the boundaries of what a society can be.

That’s a lot. Chew it over. Fire away in the comments. All that’s why Kamala’s paradigm is devastatingly effective. Joy goes deep, and in a world as troubled and hopeless as ours, it goes to the deepest place of all: the embers still burning, neglected for so long, deep down in the human spirit.

❤️ Don't forget...

📣 Share The Issue on your Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

💵 If you like our newsletter, drop some love in our tip jar.

📫 Forward this to a friend and tell them all all about it.

👂 Anything else? Send us feedback or say hello!