Opinion | The Harris-Walz Ticket Is Our Opportunity for Political Imagination

Since Kamala Harris announced her campaign for president, I have felt about politics something other than despair and disgust. I wouldn’t call it hope, but I am engaged. I am curious about what is possible.

Yes, democracy is still on the ballot. The crisis we are facing remains existential. But after almost two years of talking about Donald Trump’s extreme ideologies and Joe Biden’s age, we are participating in a substantive examination of a leader’s vision for America. We have a real opportunity to vote for someone rather than against the opposition.

We’ll need imagination. In its infancy, the United States was an act of political imagination — the idea that people could live free from tyranny, according to a set of clearly defined principles. Even then, however, there were limits. The country’s founders envisioned a prosperous and free nation, a more perfect union, but they did not extend their audacious vision to everyone, including the very people from whom they stole this land and those upon whose backs America was built. Given what limited political imagination made possible, we must consider the bounty that could rise out of boundless vision.

But. To imagine extravagant things is to want extravagant things. We have become so accustomed to mediocre political choices that we have forsaken the idea of sweeping change. I understand why. We often forestall hope by detailing, at length, why the change we most want to see will never happen.

In recent years, people have declared that a second Trump presidency is inevitable. Now, with the Harris-Walz ticket, it decidedly is not. It never was. Those anxieties are not misplaced but neither are they productive. Such presumptions are, mostly, a form of self-soothing — imagining the worst so as to be adequately prepared, a form of voluntary capitulation to the unacceptable as a way to avoid mandatory compliance should the worst come to pass.

We’ve been forced to choose between freedom for some and the status quo for others. We’ve been told, by pundits and politicians alike, that we will never be able to circumvent the two-party system to which we have long been beholden. We’ve been told that our best choices are among the gerontocracy our political leadership has become, and that change takes time, as if the political class hasn’t already had ample time to nurture successors. We’ve been told we have to vote to save democracy, we have to hold our noses and choose between the lesser of two evils, we have to wait our turn, and we have to make intolerable compromises because the alternative is even worse. When these are the only political messages you hear, a lack of political imagination is inevitable.