Mark Twain is credited for observing that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” When you’ve been around as long as I have, you really start to feel that in your bones, especially in this election.
On the one hand, you’ve got the GOP ticket, which feeds upon white grievance, fear, division and the othering of vulnerable communities. When I hear Trump say that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our nation, I can’t help but remember how unscrupulous politicians attacked the Japanese American community after Pearl Harbor. It was our “blood,” you see, that was somehow suspect. Even though most of us had never been to Japan, even one drop of Japanese blood was enough to send a child to the internment camps, according to the government authorities.
When I read about Project 2025, with which Trump is deeply tied, and see that its authors are drafting policies favoring traditional families with traditional gender roles, with the government maintaining “a biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage and family,” I know they are talking about erasing the gay community. They did this before, you see, back before we passed legislation protecting LGBTQ+ rights and liberties. I understand that my own marriage to my husband Brad would be once again at risk under a second Trump term.
When right-wing politicians target trans people, and even trans kids, with their weirdly obsessive policing of genitals, while extremist leaders and influencers call for the “eradication” of transgenderism, I know that this same hatred began back in Germany in the 1930s, the decade I was born. Few people realize this today, but the first book bonfire in Nazi Germany was not of Jewish authors but of the library of the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, once a safe home for the trans community.
So, history is rhyming in real time. But it sometimes bears happier lessons as well.
Imagine an election where the Democratic nominee was not the President but rather the former Vice President, who is suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. Meanwhile, conservatives in the GOP rally behind an extremist, and all efforts by moderate forces in that party fail to prevent a hard swing to the right for the Republicans.
The Democrats are now facing a right-wing GOP opponent with deeply repugnant views on race, one who opposes expansion of civil rights and threatens to ignite world conflict and chaos if elected.
To contrast this dark vision of the future, the Democrat runs on a platform of hope and equality, championing a progressive, pluralistic platform and then chooses—get this—a liberal politician from Minnesota as a running mate. Together they go on to win a landslide victory with a whopping 61 percent of the popular vote.
That exact scenario isn’t from 2024, but it could well be. Rather, it was from 60 years ago, in 1964, coincidentally the same year both Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were born. In that election, Lyndon B. Johnson ran with Hubert Humphrey and destroyed the far-right GOP candidate, Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The Harris/Walz ticket, and how it came to be, feels both eerily and thrillingly familiar to the Democratic ticket of that year.
And I believe the GOP will see the same crushing result.
Brad and George Takei after they were married at the Japanese American National Museum on September 14, 2008 in Los Angeles.
Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images
When darkness and fear get stoked by one side for political gain but is left unchecked, history teaches that we begin down the road toward internment and even genocide. But when it is met instead with community, joy and optimism, paired with a vision for the future free from division, the American people will choose light over that darkness.
And when extremism is on the ticket, the antidote, at least in years past, was plain and good Minnesota values, just like those championed so naturally by Gov. Tim Walz today.
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are a vision of Johnson’s world, made incarnate. The Civil Rights Era opened the door to the possibility of a multi-racial society with a biracial female president. And the promise and positivity Harris and Walz exude stand in marked contrast to the doom and carnage of the MAGA movement.
And if history is to rhyme again, it is the bright future of Harris and Walz that will prevail.
