Kamala Harris and the Democrats

W.J. Astore

The Last Best Hope of America?

It’s convention week for the Democrats, which brings me to concerns expressed by a couple of loyal readers. They tell me I’m being too hard on Kamala Harris and the Democrats. They say I’m missing a much bigger picture when I criticize them. That bigger picture is the threat of another Donald Trump victory, which very well could end elections in America, or at the very least produce a much more conservative and reactionary judiciary than the one we already have. They point to Project 2025 and challenge me to write about it and denounce it.

Together with this is one reader’s optimism for a Harris presidency. She may not be the best choice, this reader admits, but she’s shown some progressive chops. And strong support for her within the party has grown organically as she’s raised over $200 million from mostly smaller donors, money that could help her to move away from corporate agendas and in progressive directions.

And that’s all OK with me. I’m willing to hear criticism of my positions and priorities. Indeed, that’s a big reason why I started Bracing Views, not only to air my thoughts but to hear responses from others.

As I thought about this feedback, I saw this headline and story at the New York Timesthis morning:

Harris’s Muscular Patriotism: At her first rally with Tim Walz, Kamala Harris delivered a riff about their quintessentially American backgrounds. She grew up in Oakland, Calif., raised by a working mother, while he grew up on the Nebraska plains, she explained. They were “two middle-class kids,” she said, now trying to make it to the White House together.

“Only in America,” Harris said, as the Philadelphia crowd burst into a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

This sort of unabashed patriotism doesn’t always come naturally to today’s Democratic Party. But it has been central to Harris’s presidential campaign. In her ads and speeches, she portrays herself as a tough, populist, progressive patriot.

Source: New York Times/Siena College poll, Sept. 2022 | By The New York Times

Given all this, it’s not surprising that most voters consider the Republican Party to be the more patriotic one:

Source: YouGov April 2024 poll | By The New York Times

The far left plays a role here. Parts of it — think of Noam Chomsky— can be disdainful of the U.S., describing it as a fundamentally oppressive country. Liberals, not conservatives, tend to argue that immigrants are forced to move here because of the consequences of American imperialism. Liberals are more likely to have qualms about national institutions like Thanksgiving, the military or the flag.

The most prominent left-wing movement of the past year — the Gaza protests — is a case study. The movement has not merely called attention to the high civilian death toll in Gaza; it sometimes portrays the war as an extension of U.S. immorality. Protesters have pulled down American flags and defaced a statue of George Washington with the word “genocidal.”

The America-skeptical left isn’t the Democratic Party, of course. But the left does exacerbate many swing voters’ concerns about the party — namely, that it isn’t cleareyed about a dangerous world. These same swing voters generally don’t like Trump, but they do appreciate his apparent toughness on trade, immigration, crime and more.

Harris combines patriotism with muscular promises to defend the interests of ordinary Americans. “Being president is about who you fight for, and she’s fighting for people like you,” the narrator in a campaign ad says. Her ads explain that as a prosecutor, she took on murderers, child abusers, drug cartels, big banks and big drug companies.

Harris’s flip-flop on immigration embodies both the toughness and patriotism themes. As a presidential candidate in 2019 — when the left was more influential in the Democratic Party — she favored decriminalizing border crossings. Today, she promises to protect Americans from gangs and fentanyl flowing across the border, and she criticizes Trump for blocking a border-security bill.

The image that accompanied this story showed a person wearing a Kamala Harris t-shirt in which she’s depicted as Captain America.

Given this article and many others like it, I don’t think my two readers have to worry about Kamala Harris being treated unfairly by the corporate-owned news (the CON)!

According to the New York Times, Harris is going to outmuscle Trump for who can be tougher on crime, drugs, and illegal immigrants. As Captain America, she’s going to be even more muscularly patriotic (or blindly nationalistic, my wife quipped) than Trump. The only concern is killjoys on the “far left,” who think mass destruction and genocide in Gaza is wrong. They don’t think America is the greatest, goodest, bestest country in the world. But Kamala does!

Sadly, Bracing Views doesn’t have quite the same market penetration as the New York Times, so my critique of Harris and the Democrats will hardly make a dent in all the partying and enthusiasm for Kamala this week. It does seem to me, however, that the tactics being used here are yet another case of the Democrats faking left and running right.

Anyhow, here’s a reply I sent to a loyal reader and friend about my approach to Kamala and the Democrats:

I’m not anti-Harris per se.  She has such a thin record that who knows how she’d make decisions.

I am against how Harris is being shoved down our throats as an almost savior-like figure.  I am against the Democratic party, which is why I left it and am now an independent.

I am also against Trump and the MAGA crowd.  I wrote article after article denouncing them from 2016 to 2021.  Do I have to repeat all that again so that I can be “fair and balanced”?

I get that you see Trump and MAGA as major threats, much more so than the Democrats.  I see a different threat, I suppose, a uniparty that embraces empire, militarism, colossal spending on wars and weapons, and a foreign policy agenda that may yet produce World War III, whether the figurehead at the top is Trump or Harris.

I was hoping the Democrats would offer a REAL alternative to Trump with respect to the issues I cited above, but Harris is a lightweight in foreign policy whose description of the Russia-Ukraine War should really scare you for its ignorance and vapidness.  She, like Trump, will spend $2 trillion on new nukes.  She, like Trump, will brag that the U.S. military is the finest in the world, thus the Pentagon budget will continue to soar toward $1 trillion as the Pentagon continues to flunk audit after audit. She, like Trump, will keep the weapons flowing to Israel so that Gaza can be made Palestinian-free, giving more living space to Israel and Bibi.

Will Harris be more populist at home?  I guess.  Will she be friendlier to LGBTQ+ and pro-choice movements?  Definitely.  Is that enough to vote for her?  That’s up to the voters to decide.

Harris is basically trying to play from the Obama book, “Yes, we Kam,” supported by big-money donors who expect a big return on their “investments.”  Again, maybe she won’t be as bad as Trump domestically, but, as they say, the lesser of two evils is still evil.  How long must we wait for a non-evil candidate?

If we don’t push the Democratic party to offer something other than corporate tools, we’ll keep getting corporate tools like I believe Harris to be.

I stand by that response. For many Americans, the Kamala/Walz ticket is attractive, but I will continue to criticize it, as I will Trump and the MAGA crowd. For I think neither party, and certainly neither candidate, is the last best hope of America.

Readers, what do you think? Should we be enthused by the Harris/Walz ticket? Is it time to embrace the politics of joy? Should we not criticize the Democrats because the MAGA Republicans are worse? Should I write more articles that are critical of Trump, because there are not enough of those already in the CON? Fire away!