Why Joy in Politics Gives Us Life

About two months ago, the Democratic party was ready to lose to the Republicans and their candidate, former president Donald Trump. For many Americans, it seemed all too certain that Trump would be elected once more, and the United States would become a testing ground for regressive and harmful policies outlined in Project 2025.

This darkness wasn’t just restricted to the United States. The international mood was decidedly one of despair, desperation and outright fear for what would come next.

However, a month, a new nominee and several hundred million dollars in donations can change everything in politics. The Democratic National Convention wrapped up last week and Vice-President Kamala Harris is now officially the presidential nominee. The Democrats are in striking distance. They have gone on the offensive, dropping their Obama-era obsession with the moral high ground, calling attention to Project 2025 and the severity of the far right’s plans for the coming years.

Crucially, they have included a new generation of voters who have felt disgruntled by the older segments of the Democratic party. The appeal of the party, and even progressive politics, has resurged in an unexpected and, for some, a wholly welcome way.

Harris is “brat.” Her vice-presidential running mate, Tim Walz, has become a progressive populist sensation by stepping onto the national stage as the father whom many lost to far-right radicalization. And younger voices like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are the face of a new Democratic party.

A massive reform of one of the largest political parties in the world took place functionally overnight. The Democrats’ strategic communication of their pulse on the culture has resonated broadly, galvanizing the public conversation after months of muddiness and strife with Joe Biden at the helm.

People now have new language to critique Republican voters by calling them “weird,” drawing attention to their obsessions with women, queer and trans people and what happens in private spaces like bathrooms.

Across social media, people are sharing images of a trucker hat sold by Harris’s campaign that is like one sold by pop phenomenon Chappell Roan.

Harris’s campaign team has cleverly crafted short and funny press releases that demonstrate they don’t take themselves too seriously. This strategy has captured more people to donate to her campaign than any other.

The tone is different from the familiar Obama-era sermon of “hope” and “change.” There is an explicit encouragement on the American left to resist a Republican win, and to have fun in the process.

To be clear, I’m not writing an endorsement of Harris’s policies. I’m offering an appraisal of joy in politics, especially in its potential to fight fascism as the world grows more opaque.

Joy as a form of resistance has been extensively researched by Black feminist and queer scholars. It is present in recent social movements like Black Lives Matter and Pride.

In her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic,” the late American poet, professor and intersectional feminist Audre Lorde wrote that for the furthering of oppression, it must “corrupt or distort various sources of power within the culture that can provide energy for change.”

She wrote that taking back pleasure and joy is an active form of resistance in the face of oppression.

Similarly, American writer and activist adrienne maree brown’s “pleasure activism” — both the title of her 2019 book and a set of politics that connects joy with progressive politics — details how we all need and deserve to feel pleasure to bring about social change.

Pleasure, brown writes, provides a respite from despair.

For both her and Lorde, joy is fundamental to social movements and rejecting oppression. It provides energy and, importantly, connects joy with rest, a restorative act.

While brown and Lorde’s scholarship is rooted in Black feminist politics and social movements, one can see engagement in joy as resistance present in the culture surrounding progressive politics in the United States now.

This is subversive because joy in politics, especially as we know it today, is often seen as repulsive. We are trained through our media that a candidate’s attempts at being relatable or understanding pop culture are unserious, “cringe” and incompatible with politics.

However, what we’re seeing in the United States is a rejection of despair and the seriousness that is laden throughout the political sphere.

Instead, it is replaced with a politics facilitated by joy. This is restorative. It provides activists and advocates the ability to laugh in the face of outrage, fear and oppression pushed by the Republican party.

Conservative politicians use the other side of the spectrum, outrage, over joy. The right combines outrage with fear to incite negative emotions that are channelled for their electoral fortunes.

This strategy allows their supporters to jump from one issue to the next, constantly angry, desiring change and directing this outrage towards those around them.

The right thrives on the use of those emotions to secure donations, votes and power, to advance its agenda and even to deny the most basic forms of joy, such as identifying how you want to, to those they demonize.

Additionally, it is a tool of the far right to enrage progressives consistently. By keeping the left angry on issues like queer and trans rights, the right robs progressives of their ability to organize effectively on issues like affordability, housing and corruption.

However, joy disrupts the right’s narrative. It encourages progressives to laugh, to save their energy and be smart about where to place their next fight.

Political leaders do not have to be celebrities who provide “relatable” content to consume, but there is joy to be found in how others are resisting the backslide into fascism through references to pop culture, clothing or memes.

It allows us to laugh and rest instead of being constantly outraged.

While this moment of joy on the Democratic ticket is lightning in a bottle for the Harris-Walz campaign and cannot be easily replicated, there are echoes throughout our recent political history of how joy as resistance has ingrained itself in campaigns, to varying degrees.

We saw this with Barack Obama in 2008, as many people were reeling from the war in Iraq and agitating for change. Spontaneous parties broke out following his election.

The federal NDP was able to use joy in the 2011 election. The late Jack Layton utilized joy, optimism and a tenacity as a “happy warrior” to fight Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and form the official Opposition.

However, these examples did not carry the threat of a backslide into fascism like we have today. Those races were not rife with disinformation, bot farms and bad faith arguments running rampant on social media.

Considering what we’re up against now, injecting joy throughout our politics can be affirming and generative. It can prevent burnout and bring more people into progressive politics in authentic ways.

While outrage is perfectly acceptable from time to time to fuel and advance social change, choosing joy, especially now, will provide energy that will last long after election day, whatever the outcome.