“What to Fight For”: The Way Forward
On Election Day I flew up to New York City to celebrate with friends the Harris victory I had begun to think was certain. On the plane I explored what Kamala Harris’s campaign, win or lose, got right, how she addressed something that we desperately need, a rebirth of community that overcomes tribal America.
Apparently, that idea wasn’t right enough for the electorate. But, however wrong I was about the election, I finished this piece mostly unchanged to put a pin in the idea. While the pundits explain what went wrong and the Democrats indulge in their traditional circular firing squad, it’s worthwhile to mark what Harris got right.
Given the gravity of the moment, this piece is longer than my others. If I was smarter, perhaps it would be shorter.
The smarter version:
The advice Vasudeva, the ferryman, said to Siddhartha on the banks of the Ganges River?
He whispered, Listen better.
The Call to Renew Community
Kamala Harris’s closing argument in Scranton was clear: call it democracy if you must, but what we are fighting for, plain and simple, is community.
Community? Harris would define it in her concession speech; “treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor, by always using our strength to lift people up, to fight for the dignity that all people deserve.” Community.
Here’s a surprising connection: community is also what improvisation traditionally is playing for. Playing, one could say, is how improvisers fight for something, how they persuade us. Lin Manuel-Miranda’s Hamilton plays with American history, but it fights for long-delayed inclusion, equality for all.
We take it on faith that effective narrative demands conflict. John and Mary wed, but…, and you’re in a Broadway play. Improv’s key rule of agreement — yes, and… — begs to differ: conflict is not the only way forward. John and Mary wed, and… constellates community. It invites the question, not, what went wrong, but what went right? Community will always involve a bit of both, wrong and right, conflict and harmony. But community focuses on what works, the yes, and… — the rule of agreement — that is improv’s constant engine and the root of its achievement.
Taken to its dark extreme, yes, but… constellates Trump’s vision of American carnage. Yes, and… invites us into Harris’s America that puts Trump’s dark vision behind us. And we won’t go back [or so we thought].
Improv’s Community Building
Yes, and… — call and response — creates community on the stage. In 2004, Miranda and Anthony Veneziale created the theater company Freestyle Love Supreme (FLS) where performers rap and beatbox in response to prompts shouted from the audience. The narratives and songs they create are totally impromptu. And often brilliant.
In the Hulu documentary We Are Freestyle Love Supreme, FLS director Tommy Kail points out that “there’s a reason why ‘love’ is in the middle of the title of the show … It is the middle of what makes the show everything that it is.” In a nightly ritual before as they approached the stage, they chant “I got your back,” patting one another’s back. It is a benign version of the military “stack formation” deployed to infiltrate the Capitol on January 6. One of FLS’s nightly games is “True” where, whatever audience prompt is accepted, each of the members tells a personal story. The fundamental nature of intimacy — that it is about sharing vulnerabilities — is richly on display. The authenticity of the love they articulate is deeply persuasive, moving, and unusual in our culture of toxic masculinity. Community.
Improv’s Yes, and… also creates community between players and their audience. The improviser’s bravado charisma is in many ways a mere pose or mask. It doesn’t diminish or treat the audience as lower in status. Jesse Hill in his great New Orleans anthem “Ooh Poo Pah Doo” (1960) boasts that he is “the most.” But involving us in his New Orleans back beat, his “most” somehow doesn’t go one-up on us. Embracing his charismatic bravado, he seeks to “create disturbance in your mind.” Once disturbed, you’ve joined his community of funky saints. Grammar be damned, we all can be the most. Or so the paradox of democracy would have it.
I’m sure I didn’t understand Jessie Hill’s lyrics when it was part of the soundscape of our weekend dances at F&M Patio or when I snuck into the Valencia Club, a members-only Uptown spot. Nonetheless, dancing with friends and strangers to great New Orleans music gave me my teenage years’ most potent sense of community. Dancing not like our parents arm-in-arm, we danced disruptively but in sync. Community is not only in Hill’s lyrics. It is conveyed too in the syncopation that had us all favoring the heavy backbeat and singing along, call and response: ooh poo pah doo. We were all equally clueless about what it meant, its roots in Afro-centric Mardi Gras Indian tradition, and its resistance to white power. All white and clueless, and yet we were a community.
Del Close, the mad genius who helped invent comedic improv, urged his disciples to “Treat your audience like artists and poets … so they might have a chance to become them.” Substitute “well-informed voters” for “artists and poets” and it could be Harris speaking to the electorate. Jesse Hill, Del Close, and Kamala Harris all seek to empower. That’s your power, your vote, always closed her speeches. Community.
Like Freestyle Love Supreme, Kamala waged the battle for voters with and through love and joy. Kamala’s laugh and playfulness at the podium was part of her message. Let us build community, she told us, not through disinformation-charged fear and anger and aggrievement, but though joy informed by America’s true achievements, such as they are, weigh stations on the path to inclusive democracy.
Dead serious as she was and mindful of the minefield that confronts an Afro-Indian-American woman creating a coalition of Democrats and Never Trumpers, Harris with her laugh and effervescence brings playfulness to politics.
Though free of the gravitas that weighed down Hillary Clinton’s well-honed White Paper-infused speeches, nonetheless the repetition of Harris’s largely canned stump speeches lent a studied quality that worked against her natural playfulness. Canned stump speeches worked when played to local audiences. Broadcast widely across the long haul of the campaign, hers suffered from repetition modern technology — 24-hour news broadcasts and the intenet — made inevitable. Loving most everything she said, and resaid, I soon found them hard to listen to. Rote repetition adds a false note and buzzkills playfulness. It was hard to argue with complaints from the Trump base, unmoved by her effervescence, that her speeches were “canned,” or too “programmed by her handlers.”
Challenged to compress years of campaigning into 108 days, and determined to avoid gaffs, Harris crafted a stump pitch that, compared to the ever free-wheeling, free-associating Trump, grew stale. And it was of course Trump not Clinton to whom she was inevitably compared. Trump’s egregious free associations set the curve. His ever-wilder and sometimes crazier improvising maintained this advantage: they insured his adherents felt, he’s just like us. Kamala enjoys a good beer. And yet it is the teetotaler Trump with whom they’d like to share one. They ignored the paradox: nonetheless, he was just like us.
By contrast, who in the electorate could match her grace and intelligence? Her skills as an orator always on display, to be like her was inevitably aspirational.
Despite the repetition, Kamala’s innate effervescence displayed now and then the flow state that great athletes like LeBron James and Stephen Curry achieve. Despite her grueling schedule, like LeBron and Steph Kamala seemed to be having fun. How else carry on such a campaign with unflagging energy and elegance? However studied her speeches, her vivacity nonetheless conveyed presence embodied in the flow of the moment.
Trump’s undoubted charisma displayed plenty flow but little effervescence. Call it lugubrious flow, not the flow ten thousand hours on basketball courts inspire, but the flow you might find as you cross the river Styx filled with thoughts of retribution and the language of fascism that characterizes the enemy as vermin and trash.
Through all that Harris maintained — at least for her supporters — an undeniable charisma. “Charisma” is rooted in “grace, beauty, kindness.” Charisma is cognate with John Winthrop’s charity which lies at the heart of his lay sermon on the Arabella, a foundational text of American history.
Kamala’s Close
In closing her campaign, Harris for once added a fresh element to her too-canned speeches. Like Nicole Wallace on MSNBC, I heard in her closing an echo of John Winthrop’s iconic words to the Massachusetts Bay colonists, A Modell of Christian Charity (1630). Harris urged:
let’s be intentional about building community — about building coalitions, about reminding people we all have so much more in common than what separates us. There is power in that.
... It is about just strengthening our country and reminding each other we are all in this together. We rise and fall together. And that is the strength of who we are and everyone here.
It’s about leadership that is the kind of leadership that we want. Right? They are leaders, we are leaders who understand that the measure of our strength is not based on who we beat down. It’s based on who we lift up.
Communities don’t just happen. Intentionality is a key. “Spontaneity,” as Oscar Wilde coyly reminds us, “is a meticulously prepared art.”
The leadership they demand — in Harris’s vision — involves all of us. Our leadership is manifest in the power we all share, the power to vote. We all have the power to overcome identity politics, to see that “we are all in this together,” that “we all have so much more in common than what separates us.” We are all leaders because leadership is not based on whom we one-up but whom we lift up.
In Harris’s hands exceptionalism has been transformed. It’s inclusive.
Exceptionalism
Avoiding the word with its checkered history, Harris’s closing speech rebuilds American exceptionalism from the ground up. Her renewed “city on a hill” is truer to Winthrop’s than to Reagan’s. Hers is not Reagan’s boast, that American exceptionalism is a fait accompli, fully realized, a given. Like Winthrop she warns that we must achieve it or be damned.
In Winthrop’s hierarchical world, our power is less egalitarian than Harris imagines. Winthrop carries 17th century England’s tiered class society to American shores. Nonetheless the burden of his lay sermon is charity: “there are two rules whereby we are to walk one towards another: Justice and Mercy.” Loving one’s enemies and recognizing their shared humanity is a grace available to us all. It is a power promised by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5) from which Winthrop draws his key metaphor. Superseding class hierarchies by means of caritas — love, charisma — is the only way to successfully establish a Christian, or for Harris, a democratic, society. In his city on a hill, Winthrop planted the seeds of the Declaration of Independence’s vision of “all men … created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The multi-ethnic cast of Hamilton celebrates American exceptionalism but also signifies upon Reagan’s trickle-down version that Trump would largely embrace. If we’re this good, their schievement suggested, why has there until now been little room for us on Broadway? An Afro-Indian-American running for president, in her very person Harris signifies on Reagan’s top-weighted theory.
Winthrop’s Warning
But the seed of democracy that Winthrop planted has a poison pill, a caveat.
Jesus exhorts his disciples not to hide their candle under a bushel but to shine forth as a city on a hill. Instead, Winthrop warns his congregation that as “a city on a hill” the eyes of the world will be upon their “errand into the wilderness.” Being a city on a hill, if they failed, they “shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.” If they failed in Justice and Mercy toward one another, they would not be exceptional in the way we like to think, and that Reagan assumed: incomparable. Rather, what would be exceptional would be the damnation that would rain down from God and the world community. In Winthrop’s hands, “exceptionalism” is contingent. It is not just a warning but a threat. Reagan’s boastful exceptionalism is a lie. Harris means to correct it.
The global fears among democracies at the possibility of Trump’s triumph in the election — universal except among the new Axis Powers led by authoritarians like Putin, Kim, Khamenei, and Orbán — suggests the accuracy of Winthrop’s prophecy. The free world’s fear of Trump’s return to the White House sounds a lot like a kind of secular damnation. Will we soon be a pariah state?
In the face of Trump’s aggrievement-drenched horror show, Harris offers the joy and charisma of democracy, a joy and charisma that are open to all of us if only we embrace them.
After the Constitutional Convention, a good friend of George Washington Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”
“A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”
How to Build Community
Four years from now, the need to renew community and our republic will press upon us in a heightened way we can’t begin to imagine.
I’ve said in these pages that the key to teaching is the opposite of Wee Willie Keeler’s advice on hitting in baseball: you gotta hit ‘em where they ain’t.
In teaching the key is to go where they are. Once there, you take students by the hand and lead them where you want them to go. (Education comes from ex-ducere, to lead out). The constant challenge of teaching is to know what your students know and don’t know. Repeat what they know, and you bore them. Ignore what they don’t know, and you lose them.
Community building is the same. It begins with listening.
Good listening is an art, an art I tried to teach for 20 years in my courses on the literature of war. Our goal was to learn how to listen to those who fought and suffered in our name. Drawing from trauma psychologists, I argued that real listening requires:
hearing the story without injury
hearing the story without the need to deny its reality
the readiness to experience some of the terror, grief, and rage of the teller
without emotion in the listener there is no communalization of the trauma
the readiness to be changed by the narrator (note tension with #1)
willingness to suspend judgment
Improv’s Superpower
But listening is an art that improvisers by long study have also learned. Listening is improvisers’ superpower.
That art was honed in 1957 by Ted Flicker’s Compass Players, who struggled to understand why their improvisations sometimes landed and sometimes bombed. Future masters of the form — Del Close, Elaine May, and Mike Nichols — gathered in their communal kitchen to cook up this simple algorithm, the secret sauce of comic improv:
The Westminster Place Kitchen Rules
Don’t deny. If [a player] says he has a bunny in his hands, he has a bunny in his hands.
Whenever possible, make a strong choice. The less obvious the better.
You are you. What you think of as your “character” is really just a magnified piece of you. Therefore, onstage, be you.
Later, “Don’t deny” became the rule of agreement: Yes, and…. If they say they hold a bunny, then it’s a bunny. If you are trying to hear someone who is afraid, or angry or aggrieved, you don’t argue them out of it. You go where they are, hearing the story without the need to deny its reality, without judgment. You have their back.
“Strong choice … the less obvious the better” anticipates improv’s focus on anomalies, the surprising. You’re listening for how you differ trusting that together you will find and affirm what you have in common.
“You are you” embraces the player’s subjectivity as boundary, springboard, and goal. Listening means hearing without injury. We must listen true to our emotions. The empathy needed for good listening doesn’t mean becoming a chameleon, denying your true colors. Open to being changed by what you hear, nonetheless, you are you. They are they. Maybe with hard work you can, though individuals, become a community, meeting halfway, compromising, the central act of democracy.
Good listening is an art and hard work. It means changing from the prevailing narrative that runs, We are Americans, but…
to a new story:
We are Americans, and…
The more ands we deploy in the coming chaos, perhaps we will have less work to do when the dust settles four years from now.
Isabel Wilkerson is listening. Author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, she offered this on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:
When you look at this as an existential crisis over what the country will be, then it begins to make sense.
People are not voting against their own interests. People are not voting against their own interests. [sic] They’re voting for the interests that matter most to them.
For many, many, many Americans, as we saw on January 6, this means maintaining their position at the very top of the American hierarchy, at the top of the American caste system with all the rights and privileges that accrue to that. That is not something that maybe is in the best interest of the planet or the country, but that is at the best interest of the people as they ascertain it for themselves.
Modelling the Way Forward
Yes, and we need to listen to those with whom we didn’t agree about the future of our democracy.
But my thoughts go to others who need listeners.
The vote was against a Black, Asian woman. It was for a sexist, racist candidate, and for white supremacy. Our fellow citizens normalized a sociopath, a convicted felon facing more criminal charges. His commitment to autocracy will be abetted by a Supreme Court majority he and the Senate’s ruling party put in place not through fair play but through political manipulation. All of us who believed in the American experiment in democracy, who trusted in incremental progress toward justice and equality, and for whom Trump feels like the end to all that, we all need listeners.
Fifty-three per cent of college-educated white women voted for Trump. I’ll leave it to others to try to explain that.
Yes, and all women — including Blacks, those of foreign descent, and recent migrants —deserve a hearing for what the majority of Americans’ rejection of a Black-Asian American woman means to them. How it resonates intergenerationally in their families’ lives in America. What ill wind they feel it promises. Those fears need a hearing.
Listen.
We must learn to listen.
Brandon Scott is listening. Reelected mayor of Baltimore Tuesday, he said this at a press conference:
This morning, I woke up and I just gave my wife a hug. Because I know how heavy this is weighing on black women. They have carried this country and saved this country too many times and continue to be the most disrespected human beings on the planet. It quite disgusts me. I’m thinking about the world that we’re going to bring our daughter into in a few months. I want the vice president to know that she and her team did everything right in the right way. But the unfortunate reality is that this country is still steeped in racism, sexism, and misogyny.
We need to take the ferryman Vasudeva’s advice to Siddhartha on the banks of the Ganges River: he whispered, Listen better.
