Finally the 2024 election has a very "split screen" one side is dark while the other is hope and joy

Echo opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr., published in The Washington Post - Democracy Dies in Darkness....

The sudden and radical shift in the trajectory of the 2024, campaign owes to more than the replacement of President Joe Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate. To a degree that’s still not fully appreciated, Harris has embraced an entirely new strategy: She’s not just pushing back against Donald Trump’s politics of cultural division. She’s bidding to transcend it.

Choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate reinforces the move away from clichés about “coastal politics” and “cultural elites.” Instead, she wants to fight on specific, practical measures government can take to improve lives, from family leave to expansions of health coverage. Both Harris and Walz are speaking a soothing and — to pick up on Democrats’ favorite virtue these days — joyful language of patriotism and national unity.

You could tell the Trump campaign was thrown off by the Walz pick when the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, attacked the camo-wearing, gun-owning, small-town Midwestern schoolteacher as a “San Francisco-style liberal.”

Hopefully J.D. Vance signed a political "pre-nup"

Never mind that Vance lived in the Bay Area for about four years while Minnesota’s Walz visited the place for the first time only last month. The tired misfire speaks to how dependent the GOP is on stereotypes about who “liberals” are and what “liberalism” means.

Trump and Vance want liberals to be Ivy League-educated people (which describes both members of the Republican ticket but neither of the two Democrats) who look down their noses at “flyover country” and disrespect the values of small towns and the countryside. They absolutely do not want to deal with a liberalism that extols “community” and “freedom” (two of Harris’s favorite words) and favors a government active in areas where most voters favor more public action to ease their circumstances.

All the ink spilled about who was a more “centrist” or “liberal” pick for the VP job lost track of the fact that while Walz is, indeed, the second kind of liberal he is the very antithesis of the first, the variety that Republicans love to parody.

My favorite indicator of the campaign’s cultural revolution: For years, social scientists have noted that Starbucks drinkers are more liberal while Dunkin’ drinkers are more conservative. But the Harris campaign started selling T-shirts with “Harris-Walz” in the colors and typeface of Dunkin’. So much for “latte liberals.”

The contrast Harris is trying to bring home was underscored last Thursday in dueling appearances by the two nominees. Standing amid the faux-gilt of his Mar-a-Lago hotel, Trump, who has largely been homebound at a crucial point in the campaign, talked a lot about himself.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” he said, returning again and again to a slew of false claims comparing the sizes of his rallies to historic gatherings, including the 1963, March on Washington at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described his dream for the nation.

Meanwhile, Harris was in Michigan at a United Auto Workers local flanked by Walz and Shawn Fain, the union’s visionary president, to extol “the dignity of work” and the value of collective action.

While Mar-a-Lago Trump called the United States as a “very, very sick country right now,” Harris spoke an actual populist language with a strong emphasis on patriotism.

“Our campaign is about saying, ‘We trust the people, we see the people, we know the people.’ You know one of the things I love about our country? We are a nation of people who believe in those ideals that were foundational to what made us so special as a nation. … We love our country.”

The (perhaps unfair) irony is that such sentiments seemed old-fashioned from Biden but sound fresh when put forward by a younger woman — from California, for goodness’ sake! — whom no one can think of as a fogey. In a way that an 81-year-old incumbent never could, she can make calls for a bit of political peace forward-looking (“We’re not going back”) and harness the nation’s exhaustion with Trump’s gloomy acrimony.

James Davison Hunter is the distinguished University of Virginia sociologist whose 1991 volume “Culture Wars” first brought that term to wide attention. His fascinating new book, “Democracy and Solidarity,” includes an observation essential not only to rebuilding the solidarity he rightly thinks we need but also to understanding what’s going on in the 2024 campaign. “It is critical,” Hunter writes, “that we rediscover human beings underneath the abstractions of our inflammatory symbolic politics.”

When a literally straight-shooting football coach like Walz becomes the adviser to his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance because he doesn’t like seeing LGBTQ kids bullied, he moves discussions of sexual identity from academic gender theory to simple, small-town decency. When Harris says, “We love our country,” pay attention to those words “we” and “our.” Harris and Walz are waging war on “inflammatory symbolic politics.” And, yes, it’s a joy to watch.