The battle for the presidency has taken on mythic proportions. Trump, promising vengeance and retribution, is a modern Hydra, whose many heads spew increasingly venomous lies, about Haitians, women, Jews, and enemies of all races, creeds, and genders. Democrats are looking to their new hero, Kamala Harris, sword in hand, to decapitate each lying head, only to discover that, like the Hydra, Trump sprouts two heads for every one that she cuts off. There is no dent in Trump’s popularity. If anything, it seems to be improving, according to certain polls.

If the Democrats are to win, Harris and Tim Walz must find an alternative to combating the Hydra on the monster’s terms. Neither of them has Trump’s killer instincts, but they do have one thing on their side. As Sigmund Freud argued a century ago, on the most primitive level, humans are subject to two primal passions: killing and sex. As we mature, these two drives are sublimated into higher-order emotions: the will to power and the capacity to love, but in the unconscious, the primal passions survive in their primitive form, ready to emerge under stress (or inebriation). In these stressful times, Republicans have become masterful at provoking one of these primitive passions. The fateful question is: Can Democrats mobilize the other in the service of their politics of “joy”? In other words, for Democrats to overcome the politics of killing, they have to find a way to make their campaign exude, well, sex.

To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that Walz should get up on the debate stage on Tuesday and wink or blow air-kisses or strip. But I do mean that Walz has to tap into what Freud, in his famous letter to Einstein, called the erotic, in the sense that Plato uses the word Eros: the human instinct to preserve and unite. Freud explained elsewhere that it is this instinct that not only gives us the pleasure of sex, but at the same time brings together “families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.”

Trump’s campaign is not about the future, or even—Trump’s motto notwithstanding—about the nostalgic past; it’s all about excitement in the here and now. Trump is the........

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