I recently wrote an article arguing that we need to be wary of being entranced by politicians’ personalities, because what matters most of all is their policies, i.e., what they’ll actually do in office and the effects they’ll have in the world. I argued that a lot of political coverage distracts us from the serious issues that politics is actually about, like climate, war, and healthcare. Coverage of Tim Walz’s tater tot recipe, Kamala Harris’s suits, and J.D. Vance’s beard might be seen as fun, but when politics is discussed as a horse race or a drama that centers the character of politicians, we can lose sight of the very serious consequences of political decisions. I worried that while the Kamala Harris campaign was generating good “vibes,” Harris has been concerningly vague about much of what she will do in office, and we can’t let “good vibes” or Tim Walz’s “folksy Midwestern dad” image be a substitute for a clear agenda.  

MSNBC analyst and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas gave a strongly negative response to my article. His reply was also quite personal, and he even placed a picture of me next to a picture of Lil Jon to illustrate how much less fun I seem. He took me to be arguing that politics should be cerebral, dry, and policy-focused, and that political campaigns shouldn’t feature music or have fun, because these things are irrelevant to policy. While he conceded that my writing is excellent and intelligent, Giridharadas portrayed me as a person who is out of touch with ordinary people, an academic type who cannot relate to normal human beings and thinks that they are moved by statistics instead of stories. Here is his full response:  

This is an excellent, thoughtful summary of a view that is absolutely and completely wrong, fortunately now being dislodged atop the Democratic Party… The view that vibes don’t belong at the center of politics is very culturally specific to certain groups that are all head and not embodied. It’s gendered in its disdain for feeling. It shows you don’t know a lot of regular people and how they learn and think. It’s bad politics…. Maybe in your fantasy of a WASPy New England town meeting, there was all heady reasoning and no vibes. But how do you study the civil rights or gay rights or other movements and conclude that sentiment and connection and community and embodiment and, yes, dancing are superfluous?... Respectfully, this view that vibes don’t matter in politics often comes from people who simply personally are not very great at vibes. Not very strong in the connection to other people realm. You shouldn’t confuse what you are not good at for what a movement doesn’t need… People who are very smart and read a lot of books are at risk of thinking that is how most people absorb information, find new ideas, figure out what to belong to. Close your book and go talk to people. Read neuroscience. Figure out how people actually belong and find ideas… There’s nothing wrong with not being fun yourself. But please do not spread a view that political movements can afford to show people policy laundry lists and not make them feel a damn thing. This may be fine for your friend group, but please spare our movements!

Now, while this includes words like “respectfully” and praises my writing, it is on the whole a deeply insulting personal attack that is just as focused on criticizing what Giridharadas understands my personality to be like, i.e., that I am not good at connecting to people. (He has never met me, and so is drawing conclusions based on my writing.) So, first, let me say that I resent the suggestion that I am not fun and not good at vibes. I am fun. I have written many densely-footnoted essays on the various ways in which I am fun. Fun is a word that accurately describes me and a large quantity of things of which I am fond. I also somewhat resent being portrayed as some kind of elite WASP by someone who is himself from such an elite background (Giridharadas, in addition to being a prominent media analyst and bestselling author, worked at McKinsey, and so did his father). 

Second, Giridharadas is misunderstanding or misrepresenting my argument. He thinks what I am arguing is that politicians should not appeal to voters’ emotions, and should focus on the “head” rather than the “heart.” And he believes that only a cloistered nerd like me could have such a foolish view of politics. My view is also, he says, “gendered,” which I take to mean that he associates feelings with women and logic with men, so what he sees as my disparagement of feelings is interpreted by him as sexism. (Personally, I think his own assumption  comes off sexist.) But of course, this is all a response to an argument I did not make. I said that inspiring people is important. But I pointed to the example of Bernie Sanders as someone who foregrounds his program over his persona so that people know first and foremost what he stands for. I argued that a politician should emphasize what they stand for and will do, and that that's the thing we should care the most about. Giridharadas caricatures this as a demand for nothing but “policy laundry lists.” (I did show an ad from the ‘72 Nixon campaign that listed Nixon’s accomplishments, but I can’t think that Giridharadas believes it isn’t valuable to tell people what you’ve accomplished in office.) 

I feel like I’m wasting my time a bit responding to Giridharadas, because he doesn’t appear to have understood my argument. But his response is an opportunity to clarify something important about the role of emotion in politics and its relationship to “issues” or “policy.”

Giridharadas mentions the civil rights and gay rights movement, and I’m glad he did, because thinking about those movements helps show what I was trying to argue in my article. What was the civil rights movement about? It was about destroying racial hierarchy. It was not about Martin Luther King Jr. or Medgar Evers or Bayard Rustin or Fannie Lou Hamer (or their personal lives or fashion choices or their pets). They were focused on achieving something, and the actions they took were in the service of changing an unjust feature of the world.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches are laden with emotional appeals. He got people “singing, stomping, and screaming,” with crowds singing freedom songs and weeping. He spoke with words that “came out of the night and lit the darkness and showed you the way forward.” The civil rights movement consciously tried to move the country with powerful images demonstrating “the courage of peaceful protesters versus the savage brutality of the enforcers of white supremacy.” ( Quotes from Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life.) The stirring of emotions, both of movement participants and observers, was crucial to the movement’s success, which is the point Giridharadas thinks I miss.

But when I look at speeches and writings for the time, I notice something else as well: every word is in the service of the cause. Every line King writes is about achieving justice. He uses many different rhetorical tools to convince people to join him, but he is single-mindedly focused on justice, whether for Black Americans for the Vietnamese or for the poor. The issue is at the heart of everything he says. The chants of protest movements are about demands. (“What do we want?” “When do we want it?”) Movements are for something. 

I don’t know whether Martin Luther King Jr. had a dog. I do know that Tim Walz has a dog, because it has been featured in Vogue and has done more interviews than Kamala Harris. I know that politicians would often prefer that we think more about how cute their dogs are than how many lives their healthcare proposals will save. But it’s the job of anyone morally serious to make sure that we think and talk more about healthcare than a politician’s family and dog. I think if you started talking to civil rights activists about their favorite recipes and their pets and their suits (if you asked MLK “What designer are you wearing tonight?” for instance), they would have thought you had lost the plot entirely.

Now, anyone who has read Current Affairs knows that we are all for making politics fun, that we believe dancing is essential to any revolution. Our original slogan was “Making Life Joyful Again”; long before the Harris-Walz campaign, we understood that joy is an important part of the antidote to Trumpism. We fill our print issues with art, jokes, and games (subscribe for proof!), because we know that you don’t just move people with dusty, heavily-footnoted arguments. Even our heavily-footnoted arguments are, or at least try to be, fun. 

Even the negative emotions have, in my opinion, an important role. Earlier this year, I interviewed philosopher Myisha Cherry about her book The Case For Rage. One thing it argues is that anger can actually be quite rational; we often get angry because we perceive that our rules for how the world ought to be have been violated. Cherry argues persuasively  that there’s nothing illegitimate about being angry at a horrendous violation of someone’s basic human rights. Anger can be harmful or constructive depending on what we do with it. 

But to say that emotions have an important place in political persuasion, and that it is naive to think we can ever have politics without them, is very different from saying that superficial, personality-based politics is legitimate. I attacked the superficiality, not appeals to emotion. I agree with Giridharadas that we would do well to look to the movements of the past. When we do, we will notice first and foremost that they were morally serious. They wanted to stop wars or to end discrimination or poverty or oppression. Movement members experienced elation, anger, and sadness en route to their goals, but the goal was the point of the movement. The worry I expressed in my article is that when drama, personality, and “vibes” dominate our discourse, there is less discussion about what matters most, i.e., the life or death consequences of the political decisions made by our public officials. That is what we should stay constantly focused on, even as we do so joyfully or with justified rage.