I’m writing this on Monday night, so I don’t yet know how the election will turn out. I’m confident enough that sanity and decency will win out, but after being blind-sided by Proposition 8 in 2008, and then the presidential election in 2016, I don’t trust people to do the right thing as much as I used to.
Whatever the outcome, though, there’s no blaming the Harris campaign. They’ve been working tirelessly to earn every vote they can, against attacks from all sides, and understanding they’re not just working against the GOP but against voter apathy and cynicism. They’ve been stunningly effective and positive, and I think they deserve a victory lap regardless.
If for nothing else, then for choosing “Freedom” by Beyoncé as the campaign song. Not just as a campaign slogan, not just for the significance of a powerful Black woman using the music of another powerful Black woman, but as an undeniable message that this campaign was different. Dragging America kicking and screaming into the 21st century, prying it out of the claws of desperate white Boomers if need be.
And since Harris has made her last speech of the campaign, her final argument and the summation of her message, it seems appropriate to pair it with “Amen,” the last track on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter.
It’s the companion to the starting track of that album, “American Requiem,” which sets up the album’s message: it’s about reclaiming her space as a musician and, more significantly, as an American. I’d initially took it as just a play on genre, Beyoncé insisting that she doesn’t need to be relegated to R&B, she can damn well make a country album if she wants to. But there’s more to it than that, as if the cover image of her wearing a red, white, and blue suit on horseback while waving an American flag didn’t make it obvious. The idea is pretty clear: you don’t own this country, you don’t get to tell me whether I belong or not.
That’s an even more perfect fit for the Harris campaign and what makes it feel so exciting to me. For as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve had people appointing themselves to be the arbiters of who does and doesn’t belong where. Wrapping themselves in American flags, calling themselves “patriots,” shamelessly declaring that they’re the “real” Americans, acting as if everyone else is here by their grace alone. Honestly, all that Trump and Vance have done is taken that tired old idea and made it explicit. We’ve been hearing it so long, in fact, that people can wave signs reading “Mass Deportations Now,” given to them by the GOP at the Republican National Convention, and it barely got a blip of interest from the media. Promises of ethnic cleansing treated with such a lack of interest or alarm, you’d think it was yet another mass murder of children and teachers at a school.
This campaign has been all about taking back the things that have been stolen by the Republicans from Reagan onward: patriotism; belief in the ideal of America; accepting that the ideal has never been perfect, but that striving for it is the entire point; and hearing “anyone can grow up to be President of the United States” as aspirational, instead of a dire warning of the lack of safeguards in our election system.
“Amen” ends with lines repeated from “American Requiem,” and I think they’re perfect: “Them old ideas are buried here. Amen.”