Joy might not help Harris here

But polls indicate Harris may be up by less than that amount in Michigan now. And if Trump manages to outpoll Harris in Flint, in Michigan, or in other Rust Belt swing states, it might in part be because Harris has failed to convince working-class voters that she understands their wounded pride. She may want to bring joy back to America, but not everyone is feeling the vibe.

The oft-repeated campaign slogan that Harris and Tim Walz are “joyful warriors” is meant to draw a sharp contrast with the angry Trump. “Bringing back the joy” sounds like a cross between Reagan’s “Morning in America” and Marie Kondo’s “Sparking joy.” It’s time to clean the accumulated angst and aggression out of the national closet.

But rather than embracing the prospect of feeling existentially lighter, many of the working-class Americans I met at the Trump event in Flint might hear Harris’s call to joy as a euphemism for “grin and bear it.”

What do I mean?

In her important new book, “Stolen Pride,” sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that politics is about emotions and the rise of the far right is mostly about the emotions of wounded pride. “Pride and shame signal the juncture,” says Hochschild, “between the identity we hold out to the world, and how the world responds to our identity.” She continues, “Pride signals when our identity is safe, accepted, and admired.” Shame, on the other hand, is “felt as an unpleasant sense of self-deflation.”

“Perhaps most importantly, shame can stir feelings of inadequacy from which we seek rescue, and it can also serve as the basis of political appeal.”

Therein lies the danger for Harris’s joy campaign theme.

My father and my three older brothers all worked in the “shop,” as General Motors factories in Flint were called. Two of my brothers started working there before they finished high school. But I left Flint after graduating in the mid-1970s, when GM wasn’t hiring. I enlisted in the Army and eventually made my way, thanks to the GI Bill, through college and graduate school to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where I’ve been teaching since 1991.

This year, realizing I could learn little of value by staying in Washington during the election, I decided to go home to Flint to understand why Trump might very well win.

When I mention to my friends in Washington that I’ve moved back to Flint, the first thing they say — almost without fail — is “Don’t drink the water.” For them, Flint is the water crisis.

Flint residents have certainly suffered more than their fair share of ignominy. And almost all of it has come from sources that seem beyond their reach and control.

The neoliberal policies of first Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, including NAFTA, resulted in devastating deindustrialization in Flint and many other blue-collar cities. Even today, decades after General Motors largely abandoned the city of its birth, some 24,000 houses sit empty and decaying. Large swaths of what were once vibrant neighborhoods have returned to nature. Meanwhile, mobile home parks in the area, which are for many people the last bulwark against homelessness, have been bought up by private equity corporations that in some cases immediately double the rent.

Joylessness involves more than a lost job. In “Rust Belt Union Blues,” Harvard University’s Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol point out that for many hardworking Americans, losing a good union job is a blow not only to the identity and sense of purpose of that individual but also to the identity of an entire town or region.

How ingrained is Flint’s identity? Consider that even though only a fraction of what were once plentiful auto jobs still exist, Flint still calls itself “Vehicle City.”

One of the city’s favorite gathering spots is an old firehouse on the banks of the Flint River. It is now a brewery called “Tenacity,” a name that signals the sense of pride and grit that defines the city for its residents. Walking from the brewery a short distance, one finds a cluster of 19th-century buildings where GM was founded in 1908. Flint birthed an important part of the Industrial Revolution in America.

Immediately to the west of the brewery is a wetlands meadow that was once called “Chevy in the Hole,” a reference to the massive GM factories that filled the lowland valley where the Flint River flows. At their peak, these factories employed over 8,000 men and women, while all of the factories spread across the city employed upward of 80,000 workers. With the factories and jobs gone, Chevy in the Hole has been decontaminated and turned into a county park rechristened Chevy Commons.

One of the factories in Chevy in the Hole was the Chevrolet No. 4 plant, site of an important strike in 1936 and ’37. Demanding the right to collective bargaining, better working conditions, and a regular work week, thousands of striking workers locked themselves inside the factory. The 1935 Wagner Act had legalized such actions, and the Flint “sit-down strike” paved the way for industrial unions in the United States.

It also aligned the Democratic Party with Flint’s working-class voters for generations. On Jan. 11, 1937, Flint police attempted to break the strike by firing buckshot and tear gas at the strikers’ family members, many of whom were members of the Women’s Emergency Brigade, to stop them from passing food to the workers through factory windows. Michigan’s governor, Frank Murphy, a Democrat and a close ally of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, deployed the Michigan National Guard to essentially protect the strikers from the police. It was clear which side the Democrats were on.

When the war started in 1941, Flint’s factories and workers, my parents included, turned to the task of serving the “arsenal of democracy.” Parts for Pratt & Whitney aircraft engines, plus tank parts, steel shell casings, and gun mounts were made in those factories that are gone now. By the 1950s and ’60s, Flint’s working-class residents enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world. But GM’s departure in the 1980s and ’90s left behind a poisoned and dispirited city. For many, Flint became something of a sad object of ridicule.

Do Harris and her handlers understand Flint and other cities like it?

Harris’s joy campaign can be seen as yet another example of Democrats being out of touch. In 2008, in the midst of the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression, candidate Barack Obama said of the working class, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” And of course in 2016, candidate Hillary Clinton said at a New York City fundraiser that half of Donald Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables” characterized by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” views. Biden avoided similar mistakes.

Perhaps because of these attitudes, Democrats have been hemorrhaging voters without college degrees — a common though imprecise measure of working-class identity — while solidifying their lock on college-educated voters. In the latest national New York Times/Siena poll, 30 percent of white non-college-educated voters said they were voting for Harris, while 66 percent said they were voting for Trump. The percentages were almost reversed among those holding a four-year degree: 61 percent said they were voting for Harris and 35 percent for Trump.

Harris and Walz have certainly made themselves “relatable” to the middle class. But relatability may not be enough. Harris needs to demonstrate that she understands working-class anger and wounded pride. My fear is that the Democrats have become too dependent on billionaires to start poking at the system that has produced three people who own as much as the bottom 160 million Americans. Harris seems well-intentioned and sincere. But intentions and sincerity are not enough for people in cities like Flint.

During his Flint event, Trump said he would bring back the auto industry. It was of course an empty, cynical promise. But his admirers didn’t care. I think many of his supporters know he is not a serious person. He was offering them salve for their battered pride. As Trump has said, “I am your justice. . . . I am your retribution.” He is of course nothing of the sort. But Harris’s joy tour could be strengthened by adding a bit of righteous indignation to the mix.

Steven Livingston is a professor of political science at George Washington University.