Opinion | Why Democrats Need a Politics of Joy

There is something about the way elite culture flaunts the repression of enjoyment. — Yes. — I saw there was this clip that had gone viral the other day from the guy who hosts ”The Diary of a C.E.O.“ I had a year of not drinking, decided to have a drink again. It ruined three days of my life. I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn’t get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused. So it meant that I got worse sleep that night. I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. And then I podcasted worse, I didn’t go to the gym the day after that day or the day after because of that, because I felt really bad. I then slept worse and I was like, Oh my God, those three glasses of wine had this hidden domino effect that I must have been living with. It hit a nerve because it was hitting this culture. It was an example of this culture in which there is a status in optimizing everything. The Oura Ring, you never have a drink. And I do think people have this feeling of, like, well, what about enjoyment? Like, what’s the point of all this? A.I. can already do a bunch of the things we can do. If we’re not going to be here and enjoy music, enjoy a drink, enjoy great food. If you’re going to endlessly be having a glucose monitor and you’re not a diabetic and then you’re like, well, pasta, it really spikes my glucose. Fancy that. And, this is what the people. I mean, you listen to some of the top podcasts which will have all kinds of health influencers on. And I’m not saying necessarily that they’re wrong about what they’re saying. Sometimes they are, but it just sounds so joyless. I was watching something go around the other day that was like from this study, and it was like, turns out that doing 12 air squats every 45 minutes is better for you than running to whatever it was. It’s like, I think I don’t want to say, I’d rather die than do 12 squats every 45 squats —— I don’t even know what an air squat is, so I’m probably ahead. But it didn’t seem like a way to live. No, no. I think, yeah, the other way I could title a book about current state is ”No Way to Live.” None of this is a way to live. May I posit — and I don’t know, there could be some blowback or pushback on this, but — that this is a problem for us as Democrats. But the one thing about Trump — humor is always, even when it has this very nasty edge, it’s seen as a kind of joyous thing. And he would belt things out. And then he would . . . and people listened. Speaking of Trump, Emily Nussbaum, I think, wrote the best piece ever on that when she wrote in The New Yorker about Trump really stealing, appropriating, as they say, the humor of Jewish Borscht Belt comics of a certain period, right? And then using it for his own evil purposes. So I think a lot of the other Trump wannabes try to do this. Many of them fail. But there is that kind of motion. Trump is a sensualist. — Trump is in some horrible —— — He loves a pretty room. — He loves a pretty room —— — Thinks a lot about interior design. Loves a good musical. That’s right. Right. JD Vance is not a sensualist. Marco Rubio is not a sensualist. Trump is. I think you’re absolutely right. And maybe there is, in a horrible way, something that we can take away from this, that the people that we nominate to be our leaders can’t be . . . I mean, Kamala Harris, she talked about joy so much that you knew that there wasn’t that much joy going on. It was this ”Look at the joy.“ It’s what we call in fiction telling, not showing. Joy, joy, joy. But we need leaders or candidates who can evince not just the unhappiness of everything we’re confronting, from climate change to inflation to the mess that’s going to be left to us when the president leaves. And that’s not easy to do because we’re so programmed to this idea that we have to democracy-maxx, and we have to be constantly talking about all the terrible things instead of talking about the things that give us pleasure, the things that we love, the parts of community that make life livable.