On the Politics of Joy

Founded in 1946, the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, sponsored by the Archdiocese of New York, has taken place in every presidential election year on the third Thursday in October. Named after the first Catholic to run (in 1928, despite widespread anti-Catholic bigotry) as a major party nominee for president, the event raises money for the needs of vulnerable women and children. As the Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote in late September, the dinner is an emblem of our political system’s health; a place of common ground where humor and mutual good will can replace, at least for an evening, the war of partisan ideas.  

As evidence she quoted Barack Obama, who at the 2012 dinner, in the grip of a tough campaign, stressed that it “says something about who we are as a people that in the middle of a contentious election season, opposing candidates can share the same stage; people from both parties can come together to support a worthy cause.”

In her own words, Noonan added that the Al Smith Dinner is not merely “a splendid thing,” but a setting where

candidates demonstrate through the fact of their togetherness that our democratic system, which often seems so frail, so ready to give way, still holds, still endures, that it has a hidden health, a latent strength that will bear us through . . . 

To be dead to this tradition, to say no to it in a way that will inevitably bring more no’s in the future—the dinner is never convenient—is to contribute to the ending of something good. In that sense it is worse than a mistake, it is a sin.

The trigger for Noonan’s column was Kamala Harris, this year’s Democratic Party nominee. Harris declined her invitation to attend the dinner. She’s the first such candidate to do so in forty years. Some have expressed regret or concern, but it’s hard to share that view. Whatever her motive, I think her decision reflects a truth of the current election season and is therefore almost—almost—refreshing.

One might argue that, sadly, Harris has been forced to miss the Al Smith event and focus on campaigning in the battleground states in order to defeat an existential threat to “our” democracy posed by the evil crypto-fascist alternative. But this seems dubious. Rather, I think Harris’s decision reflects her real priorities, her real convictions, and a perception that faithful Catholics—as opposed to the nominal, the lukewarm, and the disaffected—are lost to her anyway. The result is a revealing contrast. Barack Obama, whatever his flaws from a Catholic perspective, had exceptional skill at presenting himself as appealing and reasonable, even to hostile audiences. Harris has no such talent. This makes her seeming move to the center on immigration, border security, and various other disputed issues so transparently clumsy and insincere.  

The one issue that clearly does have Harris’s passion, amounting to a religion-like zeal, is abortion and the spinoff legal and sexual implications that surround it. When it comes to abortion, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and birth control, this year’s Democratic Party campaign ads have an overheated paranoia reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fantasy The Handmaid’s Tale. Simply put: Harris has zero respect for the rights of the unborn child in utero up to the moment of birth. And as ethicist Charles Camosy has noted in these pages, her running mate, Tim Walz, goes even further, effectively supporting infanticide. Nor does the Harris/Walz ticket inspire any confidence—in fact, just the opposite—on matters of religious freedom.

Despite the above, as Peggy Noonan noted in a subsequent, early October column, the Harris/Walz campaign claims to be offering a “politics of joy,” a trope obediently repeated by a tribe of celebrities and press flacks—and this, despite Harris having an “unfavorable” rating in recent Gallup polls relatively worse than that of Donald Trump, a man who’s no magnet of sunny support himself. As of last month, the Gallup organization reported that Trump’s negative rating was seven points higher than his favorable (46 percent) ranking; Harris’s unfavorable rating was 10 points higher than her favorable (44 percent) ranking. Of course, that can easily change. Harris has a modest edge in overall polling, and nearly a month of heavyweight political warfare remains before Election Day. But nothing about the current mood of our country seems to be arcing toward “joy.”  

It’s worth recalling that the English word “joy” derives from the Old French word joie, which in turn comes from the Latin gaudere, “to rejoice.” Joy is something more than pleasure; more than material contentment; higher than mere happiness. It’s an elevation of the spirit; an experience of things transformative, things beautiful and greater than ourselves. Which is why we can honestly preach the evangelii gaudium—“the joy of the gospel.” And why we can never say the same about politics—especially the kind that has blood on its hands.

Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church (Ignatius).

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Image by Gage Skidmore, provided by Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.