In the heat of a political season, I like to take note of the theme songs presidential campaigns carefully select to frame their appeals. Kamala Harris uses Beyonce’s rousing anthem “Freedom” in her ads and events. Bill Clinton chose the golden oldie “Don’t Stop (Thinking about Tomorrow).” In the teeth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered the hopeful “Happy Days are Here Again.” In the 1990s, the quirky independent candidate Ross Perot, perhaps winkingly, leaned in to his reputation with Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”
But even more powerful and evocative than campaign songs are some of the chants that punctuate political rallies, welling up seemingly at will. They can be inspirational (“Yes we can!”) or not (“Lock her up!”) or both, depending on your feelings for the incumbent (“Four more years!”) They rally the faithful and rattle the opposition. And because they don’t require singing in tune, anyone can join.
The Harris campaign’s joyful and defiant chant “We’re not going back” doesn’t scan as smoothly as “Yes we can,” but it is powerful because it works on so many levels. On the stump, in campaign ads, and repeatedly at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, Harris and her supporters have used this mutable phrase both as a cudgel and a beacon.
When they chant “We’re not going back,” Harris supporters mean, of course, that they’re not going back to the chaos and corruption of Donald Trump’s presidency. But they’re also not going back into the closet, as some homophobic, transphobic forces in the opposition party would prescribe. They’re not going back to the back-alley abortions that jeopardized the lives and health of so many desperate women before Roe v. Wade legalized reproductive rights in 1973. They’re not going back to the back of the bus, losing hold of the voting and accommodation guarantees of the civil rights era. And they’re not going even further back to a time when unaccountable kings ruled the land, despite what a reactionary Supreme Court has decreed on the matter of presidential immunity.
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So the chant, to paraphrase Harris herself, exists “in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Context is key for political slogans; they work best if they strike a responsive chord with larger historic or campaign themes. When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, “Yes we can” resonated with the United Farmworkers’ slogan “¡Si, se puede!” an exhortation for struggling workers everywhere. (Careful listeners closer to Massachusetts also heard the echo of Governor Deval Patrick’s somewhat weaker version, “Together, we can” from his own campaign two years before.)
Another plus for “We’re not going back” is the way it orients the Harris campaign to the future, in contrast to Donald Trump’s “Make America great again,” with its bitter nostalgia for the past. But here is also where I sense some risk. Many Americans, and not just MAGA extremists, do feel an inchoate yearning to go back — if only in their idealized memory — to a country less lonely, less cutthroat, less dominated by corporate power and dizzying technology. From the start, Trump’s movement has tapped into this sense of dislocation, scapegoating everyone from immigrants to academics. Harris needs to recognize the legitimate anxieties of voters who feel beaten down or left behind and offer them — as the campaign’s freshly minted slogan has it — “A new way forward.”
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For all its appeal, the Harris chant is essentially negative. If we’re not going back, then where are we going? Harris can address this by continuing to flesh out her “vibes” campaign with specifics, especially in her economic plan. She can counter the Trump campaign’s cynical fake populism and its appeal to “family values” with her emphasis on economic fairness and true pro-family policies like child care subsidies and paid leave. While she’s at it, Harris and the Democrats generally should be unapologetic about reclaiming ideas of family, freedom, and patriotism from the far right. We’ve seen a bit of that at the DNC this week: so many American flags, and it’s been strangely heartening to hear the jingoistic “USA! USA!” chanted in support of values like honesty and kindness.
Thanks to Republican intransigence and especially Trump’s judicial appointments, the country already has seen dangerous backsliding on voting rights, individual freedom, corporate responsibility, and income equality. With some powerfully united energy in Chicago this week, Kamala Harris is promising voters that America isn’t going back but coming back.
Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.
