Sean Murphy

Because electing Kamala will continue the promise of America’s Founding Fathers

Never mind policy, at this point. Or let’s acknowledge the cake has been baked—just about all voters know who they’re backing and happy to explain the reasons why. For this final stretch, it’s all about any undecided voters: If you’re still on the fence despite the myriad reasons, marching forward makes so much more sense—economically, spiritually—than retreating into a past that’s equal parts fantasy (MAGA?) and horror (the incompetent response to COVID, January 6, etc.), then consider how you’d like to see the weird, wonderful story that is the American experiment continue for the next four years.

Let’s also concede that if the Republicans understand one thing, it’s how a story works. Funny, they don’t tell especially good stories, but they know how to make their voters feel. And Democrats feel so deeply, they fall into the trap every creative writing class warns about: they tell instead of show. Donald Trump has pioneered a politics where not only is cruelty the point (who even needs policy when being a bully is everything?), but all his fans get to be the main characters in this cosplay drama. Perpetually aggrieved, forever on the offense: this is catnip for half of our country; many of whom feel ignored or disenfranchised for understandable reasons. Like any addict, they believe their dealer is going to heal what ails them. Democrats, and there’s sad irony here, by seeking to unite, invariably divide—often the very people their policies and philosophies want to include. It’s unrewarding and occasionally futile work to fight for the very demographics that historically reject you (we can, and should, blame Fox News, racism, and many other well-argued reasons, but we can’t overlook that, for better and often for worse, the Republicans have figured out how to tell them stories they want—and need—to hear). The solution? Tell—and sell—a better story.

Trump himself is a narrative (yes, his policies, the people he surrounds himself with, the people who enable him, the people who support him, all make of the various chapters that are the novel of his malevolence). 

Kamala, too, is a narrative. Her mere presence—as the first female, first African American, and first Indian president—is an entire story unto itself, and it’s as positive and inspiring as Trump’s is negative and despairing. 

This is not enough, of course, but it’s the cornerstone of the better story we can write. This story involves not only what Kamala represents and what she can do but also what her election represents and what we can do with a united, progressive, inclusive, and patriotic (yes, patriotic) mission—this is the audacity of hope, redux, but it’s also a blueprint for the better future we all deserve. Electing Kamala is an invitation to help write this story, it’s a continuation of the promise America’s founders imagined, it’s the perpetuation of a great story, always in progress, constantly in need of revision, ceaselessly trying to write a better ending. Electing Trump means one person, and one idea, controls the narrative, no one else welcome at the table (most especially anyone who is not a very wealthy, white male which happens to be about 99 percent of us), it means censorship and white ink rewriting a unique history written with the pain, sweat, and blood of the better angels who helped forge the path we’re on, who made it possible for us to dare dreaming tomorrow could be better, that our children would have a fighting chance to keep fighting, to keep writing, to keep telling the stories of our lives.

Sean Murphy is founder of the nonprofit 1455 Lit Arts and directs the Center for Story at Shenandoah University. He has appeared on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and his story collection, This Kind of Man, was published in 2024. He has been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, twice for Best of Net, and his book Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone was the winner of Memoir Magazine’s 2022 Memoir Prize. To learn more, and read his published short fiction, poetry, and criticism, please visit seanmurphy.net/ and @bullmurph.