In Tim Walz's introductory speeches to the nation in various swing states last week, he repeatedly framed this election in stark terms. First, it's a race between "weird" people like JD Vance and "normal" people like himself. Even more profoundly, if such a thing is possible, it's a race to determine the direction of time.
As he declared at a rally in Detroit on August 7: "Simple proposition: This election is about which direction this country is going to go in. We know Donald Trump is taking us backwards." Josh Shapiro relentlessly agreed in his speech conceding the Vice Presidential nomination to Walz. Harris is all "forward or back" as well, in every recent rhetorical foray. Their supporters have taken, when not chanting "he's a weirdo," to chanting "we're not going back."
Pitting the whole election on the nature, direction, and rate of time is a bold move on Democrats' part, connecting their campaign with the work of Immanuel Kant, who held that time was the pure form of interior perception, and Albert Einstein, who pointed out that time itself "bends" around massive objects. It seems likely that if Harris is elected, she’ll introduce a Time Variance Authority as a new cabinet-level agency here in the MCU, or whatever universe we may find ourselves in next, to prevent eddies, floods, and droughts in the flow of dimensionality. And definitely to prevent reactionary rhetoric from dragging us back to the past.
So, let me be clear (indeed, make me be clear—please, I'm begging). This election, the most important in my lifetime, comes down to a simple, yet metaphysically impossible choice. Should we go back in time and recover a mythological golden age, or should we force time to run more and more quickly forward toward a future bright with promise? 2024, whatever that is, deploys progressives against reactionaries on the battlefield of time itself. They are doing battle over who’ll control the volatile, malleable fourth dimension, and hence determine the rate and direction in which time proceeds.
Admittedly, the notion that time itself has a rate is nonsense, as time constitutes the possibility of rates, if you get me (and even if you don't). And the idea that time has a direction itself seems to confuse time with space. But we are Americans. We dream big. We dream of forcing time itself to do our bidding. This will be difficult specifically for us Americans, as we're in a pure tug of war, with time itself as the rope. Fifty percent of us want time to go one way, and 50 percent the other. Maybe that's why time has stopped. Or has it?
That time has stopped as people try to pull each other into the mud is confusing to all Americans. It's a relief to stop aging. But the fact that nothing can happen ever again threatens a certain boredom. On the other hand, if Trump and Vance are going to turn time around and make it head backwards, as Harris and Walz indicate that they will, they'll have to stop it first. That’ll be hard work, but fortunately they have American workers, the greatest in the world, working to stop time itself.
A person who was neither a progressive nor a reactionary, if there were any such people, might have some misgivings about this. He might point out that time is proceeding at a steady clip no matter what anyone says. You aren't going to turn it around or goose it so it runs faster, such a spoilsport might remark.
And leaving Einstein aside for a moment, an asshole like that might point out that both parties' talk about time is the worst sort of jive. If I offered progressive Democrats the chance to go back to the New Deal or the Great Society or Marx or King or "ask not" or Lincoln's second inaugural, what might they say? Speaking of, at Barack Obama's first inaugural, he portrayed a return to America's founding values. And Vance, likewise, is not going to be dragging us back to the 1950s. You can sort of tell because now the whole "back to the future" thing is taking place on Instagram. Time keeps on ticking ticking ticking into the future, no matter what anyone says.
"Progressive" is a political identity, and it seems to deploy a theory of history. Despite glitches here and there such as Trump, time goes forward and we make progress. In general, things are getting better and better. "The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice," to quote Obama quoting King. But first, the only conceptual structure in which that makes sense is theological: an omnipotent, benevolent Being is conducting us necessarily toward a certain moral outcome. The view is providential; it’s eschatological; in short, it’s a religious position. And second, though this is the progressivism of King and Obama, it doesn’t seem, on reflection, to be the progressivism of progressives right now.
Today's leftists seem more intent on issuing dire warnings of inevitable or almost-inevitable doom. Many progressives I know use the phrase "burning world" a lot and seem to think that life on earth will be extinguished by micro-plastics. They warn that the direction of history is at stake in every election as they face time bandits such as Boris Johnson, Trump, Meloni, Le Pen, Orban, or whomever. They assert that the world is teetering into reaction and doom.
That makes it hard for them to argue that things are inevitably getting better and better, but they argue that too, all the time. That's what "we're not going back" means. As Americans, we never stop thinking about the future! But progressives had better figure out whether that means that they should never stop expecting justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream, or whether that means we've reached the tipping point and should despair.
At any rate, "later" definitely doesn’t mean "better," as everyone alive today will readily admit. So maybe we should head back after all. To the New Deal! Sadly, however, this isn’t one of the possibilities, due to the metaphysical nature of time itself.
So the Dems will have to stick with "He's. A. Weirdo" "He's. A. Weirdo." True, that expresses nothing but the ambition of the people chanting it to appear to be typical, non-outstanding, unusual. But people who desperately need to be normal, who’ve committed themselves with real passion to not seeming odd, need representation too. The Harris/Walz ticket is giving it to them, good and hard.
Harris and Walz and their enthusiastic audiences of the moment are committed fully, we might say, to social success in the high school lunch room, the source of their deepest commitments. Seems like a high school football coach might be a good choice there.
But me, I'm not going back.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
