Why Joy is an Effective Anti-Authoritarian Strategy.

In Turkey and Chile, joy and optimism have been successful against autocrats

Can "Joy and Hope," the slogan of the Harris-Walz campaign, help Democrats to win the 2024 election? Patrick Healy, deputy opinion editor of the New York Times, is doubtful. "I cringed a little in the convention hall Tuesday night when Bill Clinton said Kamala Harris would be the 'president of joy'," Healy wrote in a recent op-ed, comparing the Democratic focus on joy to Donald Trump's embrace of his anointment as a divinity by his most fervent followers. "Joy is not a political strategy. And God is not a political strategy."  

I disagree. As I have written in Strongmen, positive emotions such as love, solidarity, and yes, joy, have been part of successful anti-authoritarian political strategies. Positive emotions motivate people to engage in politics when they might have grown apathetic or cynical about the possibility of change.

Americans were ready to feel joy. Healy's impulse to "cringe" when the possibility of a "president of joy" was mentioned is not just a sign of discomfort with strong emotions in politics. It was a reaction to something unfamiliar. For almost a decade now, Trump and his allies have been flooding our social media feeds and television screens with negative images and rhetoric designed to evoke fear, contempt, hatred, and disgust with others.

The goal of such messaging is to create enemies, but it also aims at making us feel hopeless and down, so that we lose our faith in ourselves and each other. That is why Trump goes out of his way to degrade everyone around him. He engages in ritual humiliation of the sycophantic GOP politicians who support him, and goes out of his way to let his grassroots followers know that he does not care about them. “Even if you vote and then pass away it will be worth it," he told Iowans during the January caucus.

In fact, even passing away does not guarantee you will not be denigrated by Trump. Just the other day he treated the Arlington National Cemetery grave of Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee as a backdrop for a photo in which he performed his trademark thumbs-up gesture, as though he were at a rally.

All of this is profoundly depressing, and I believe that we have not fully digested the emotional and social effects of this relentless psychological warfare. No wonder joy seems shocking! No wonder people are flooding into the stadiums, convention centers, and other venues to hear Harris and Walz. These politicians genuinely care about others and the country. They fill us with hope that together we can do what is possible to save our freedoms.

Turkey, 2019: Optimism and “Radical Love”

Now imagine living in an authoritarian state where hundreds of thousands have been arrested and investigated by the government, in a country where 160,000 have been investigated over eight years for alleged insults against the president, and almost 39,000 had to stand trial. That would be Turkey, where in 2019, opposition politician Ekram Imamoglu ran for mayor of Istanbul and had the audacity to make optimism and "radical love" the centerpiece of his winning campaign against Binali Yildirim, the contender backed by autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Imamoglu, an observant Muslim with liberal views, eschewed mass rallies and negative campaign messages. Instead, he walked the streets to “engage people directly, no matter what their ideology,” as he later recounted. Hugging voters in cafes, mosques, and parks created connection and trust. His campaign slogan, “everything will be fine...if there is hope," may seem banal to some, but created a sense of possibility that maybe Turks could live without fear and harassment. And that produced a voter turnout sufficient to lead Imamoglu to victory.

Chile, 1988: The March for Joy

Joy has prevailed in even more challenging circumstances. Who has a March for Joy in a military dictatorship? Chileans did, and it contributed to the end of autocracy in that country. Augusto Pinochet had come to power in 1973 through a U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Socialist President Salvador Allende and instituted a reign of terror: thousands rounded up and packed into the National Stadium, its locker rooms transformed into torture sites; universities taken over by the military, which closed entire departments and sent leftist professors to jail and to concentration camps; and many other horrors.

Chile had enjoyed a robust democracy before the coup, and by the early 1980s an alliance began to coalesce among faith leaders, labor officials, and people experiencing economic hardship due to the regime's neoliberal policies. By 1983, when the newly formed Democratic Alliance of opposition parties held a National Day of Protest, the unemployment rate was more than 20 percent.

Pinochet also began to lose the support of his U.S. backers. As Elliot Abrams, who served as President Reagan’s assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, recalled, by then Pinochet had “outlived any usefulness he had ever had. Even if you thought he was terrific in 1973, by 1983, it was time for him to go.”

Pinochet's new Constitution, passed in 1980, required him to participate in a plebiscite in 1988 that would decide if he could stay in office. El Generalissimo had agreed to it, never dreaming that he would be in a position of vulnerability.

It was in this context that the idea of a March for Joy was born: Chileans had a chance to free themselves from dictatorship —if only people could overcome their fear of beatings and arrests and turn out to vote. Nine political parties joined the Concertación coalition, and a huge effort got under way to register Chileans to vote.

The National Endowment of Democracy and Civic Crusade, helped by $2.2 million of American aid, registered 7.4 million Chileans and trained 120,000 poll watchers. Activists went door to door to convince people their vote would matter, and a Tribunal of Jurists was established to ratify a parallel vote count.

The March for Joy was scheduled for days before the election, and the opposition’s positive ads featured optimistic slogans such as “Joy is coming” and “Happiness is a rainbow” (the rainbow was Concertación’s symbol). Television ads that featured soccer stars and ordinary people expressing hope for Chile’s future were a sensation.

Demonstrators at an anti-Pinochet rally, 1988. The badges urge people to vote “No” in the upcoming plebiscite. Marcelo Montecino/Getty Images

Pinochet’s ads, instead, repeated his old talking points about the threat from leftists and harped on grievance and loss. They showed a man drowning in rising water, a mother and child fleeing an armed mob, and even Allende resurrected from the grave and clutching a rifle.

As it became clear that the democratic opposition was winning over the populace, the regime redoubled its terror tactics. The offices of the opposition campaign were firebombed, volunteers were beaten, rallies were forcibly dissolved, and thousands were arrested. This makes the commitment to positive messaging based on the possibility of joy, and the turnout this produced, all the more notable.

The dictator’s defeat on October 5^th, 1988 made headlines around the world: the opposition received  54.7% of the vote, to 43% for the junta. Pinochet’s exit package let him stay on as head of the Armed Forces until 1998, and he spent his last year in office stacking the Chilean Supreme Court to make sure his loyalist justices had a majority.

Yet the new democratic government got to work to undo some of the damage. Victims’ families got reparations payments, hundreds of political prisoners were pardoned, and exiles received repatriation assistance. By 1994, 50,000 of 200,000 Chilean exiles had returned home.

I often think of the bravery of the Chilean people, who invested in the power of joy and optimism when they had little reason to do so. The opposition bet on joy to counter negativity and nihilism and conjure the possibility of a better future, with leaders who would respect Chileans rather than torture them.

As I wrote in a 2022 op-ed that found no takers, the experiences of Chileans and Turks and others who leveraged the power of positive emotions hold valuable lessons for Americans today. As I argued, "a national campaign that explicitly elevates solidarity, kindness, tolerance, and empathy as core values of multiracial democracy. and presents policy as flowing from agendas of care and compassion would likely resonate."

Now that campaign has arrived, and it is indeed resonating. We can avoid the horrors of autocracy by preventing the forces of reaction from coming to power. Joy and optimism can play a big part in this. Far from being cringe-worthy, joy is precious and noble and also the basis of effective anti-authoritarian strategy.

References: Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies: Chile under Pinochet (W.W. Norton, 1993); and Steve Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile (Duke University Press, 2006) have detailed accounts of the 1980s and the opposition's successful campaign to end the dictatorship.

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