Kamala Harris May Force a Reckoning

Harris emerged as VP in the summer of 2020 when it seemed the country might finally deal with its defining demons. But as the reactionary counter-mobilization triumphed, she was sidelined. Until now.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Wilmington, Delaware in August 2020 - credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images

A text from my mother in Germany, just minutes after the initial statement was released, alerted me to Joe Biden’s decision to “stand down,” as he put it, and drop out of the presidential race. “Have you seen the news from America?” my mother texted, and if not for her message, I might not have heard about this remarkable turn of events until many hours later.

I am currently traveling in Europe, trying to handle and navigate a family health situation while also giving the kids a proper summer vacation. The avalanche of historic (mostly in a bad-to-catastrophic sense) events and developments in July has made it entirely impossible to take an actual break from American politics. But I have been strictly containing news consumption and work time to when the kids are in bed, and I promised myself I wouldn’t be staring at my phone the whole time. I have even been holding off on writing about political violence and the Trump assassination attempt, what the JD Vance pick tells us about the state of the rightwing coalition, and the blood-and-soil “Real Americanism” that dominated the Republican convention. I hope to reflect on all of this when I’ll be ramping up the publication schedule again in August.

But when an event is perceived as so momentous that it moves my 75-year old mother - a woman who has never cared about politics and finds the idea of anyone wanting to leave the very rural, very Catholic area in southwest Germany where I grew up fanciful and, frankly, a little odious - to send out text alerts, it’s worth chiming in. I am certain I never had a discussion about politics with my mother when I still lived in that little village. “The Biden situation,” “Where is Kamala?” and “What happens if Trump wins?” is all she’s been wanting to talk about since we got here in early July. The world is watching, anxiously.

Joe Biden’s initial statement was published at 1:46pm - and notably, it did not include an explicit endorsement of Kamala Harris. That worried me. If not Biden, then Harris is by far the most reasonable choice. I may like other Democratic politicians better in a vacuum. But we’re not in a vacuum. I have never encountered an argument for an open convention - or passing Harris by via some other game show / gladiatorial format - that didn’t, at best, fall in love with the five percent likelihood of a best-case outcome while steadfastly refusing to engage with the 95 percent likelihood of outcomes ranging from dicey to disastrous. Was Biden really going to help throw his VP under the bus and the party into chaos?

He was not. The “full support and endorsement for Kamala to be the nominee of our party” followed 27 minutes after the initial statement. And what’s happened since has been nothing short of miraculous. The Democratic Party has shown a quite unexpected level of coordination and, dare I say, unity. As I am writing this, Harris has been endorsed by so many of the key figures in the party that it certainly seems like the remaining 100+ days until the election will be spent not on infighting, but on making the best possible case for Harris against Trump to the American people.

Democrats are rallying behind Harris, and the general mood among those who want to prevent Donald Trump from ever getting back to power seems to have changed in an instant. Within moments of Joe Biden releasing his statement, the discourse shifted from a focus in how he was too old and too selfish to how he did the right thing, to how a great public servant finished his political career with a patriotic act of selflessness. The question of whether or not Biden “deserves” any of this - the harsh critique before his retreat, the heroization since - is, politically, irrelevant. “Deserve” has got nothing to do with it. The politically salient fact is that the Democratic coalition is displaying a palpable sense of relief.

Blood-and-soil nationalism vs democratic pluralism

Donald Trump. JD Vance. Joe Biden. Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris’ Mystery VP Choice. The political discourse is necessarily very personalized right now and focused on personalities. Small-d democrats should remember that the November election isn’t actually about specific candidates, however. The question Americans will be asked to answer is: Should the democratic experiment be continued and America be pushed towards realizing its promise of egalitarian multiracial pluralism – or should a radicalizing minority of white reactionaries be allowed to impose its vision on the country with the help of a vindictive autocrat in power?

Then again, Trump and Harris certainly embody the respective political projects they are representing quite well. Immediately upon Biden announcing his retreat, a video was making the rounds on social media that many people seem to have mistaken as the opening salvo of the 2024 Harris campaign. It was actually her - ultimately unsuccessful - pitch from the 2019/20 Democratic primaries for why she should be her party’s presidential nominee: “I prosecuted sex predators. Trump is one. I shut down for-profit scam colleges. He ran one. I held big banks accountable. He’s owned by them.” Since November 2019, when Harris made this argument to Democratic primary voters, Trump has been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, and his perverse corruption and overall criminality certainly aren’t any less urgently disqualifying. In fact, almost five years later, there is an even better case to be made for Harris, an even starker and more comprehensive contrast to be drawn. As Madiba Dennie put it succinctly on Bluesky: “A woman at the top of the ticket with a post-Dobbs electorate - A Black woman vs a white supremacist - A former prosecutor vs a current felon - A coherent young person vs an incoherent old person.”

How democratic is the Democratic Party?

A lot of people are (pretending to be) mad about the fact that the Democratic Party as aligning quickly and forcefully behind Harris. What about the primaries? The lack of democratic legitimacy? How dare they deprive the American people of an “open” process?

Most of that is just silly concern trolling. Clearly, the Trumpian Right has been blindsided by these events. They seem to have been confident they would beat Biden and are struggling mightily to pivot. Some in mainstream media, like the editorial board of the Washington Post, seem addicted to political drama and spectacle - or devoted more to an entrenched narrative (Dems in disarray!) than to accuracy and measured assessment. Much of the centrist punditry seems to be taking it as a personal insult that Democrats aren’t providing the kind of summer entertainment they evidently were hoping for - which is weird, considering they all pretended until Sunday they were only concerned about Biden’s age and ability to beat Trump.

As for the question of democratic legitimacy: Yes, the party is deciding in this case. But that doesn’t automatically make it an illegitimate affair. Parties play an important role in the democratic process, ask every functioning democracy in the world. The idea that a contested convention would have meant any less back room dealing and decisions being shaped by powerful party officials is rather bizarre. And lest we forget, Kamala Harris was on the victorious Democratic ticket in 2020, and during this year’s primaries, it was obvious she was going to continue serving with Joe Biden. Whatever democratic legitimacy derives from that, it is more than any of her potential challengers possess.

“Electability” talk

Can Harris beat Trump? We are in for a lot of “electability” talk. Simply ignoring events in the real world, for instance, the New York Times got together a bunch of its opinionists to give us their takes on “How These 10 Democrats Would Fare Against Trump.” That’s right: They just selected nine other Democrats to compare to Harris, including some who have already endorsed the VP and others who had never been mentioned as part of the inner circle of contenders even before Biden dropped out. The only two categories: how “electable” people are, and how “exciting.” And guess who came in dead last in terms of electability, in the averaged esteemed opinion of this group: The person who will be the actual Democratic nominee.

Why is Kamala Harris such a bad candidate, exactly? She is a “mediocre politician,” Ross Douthat gets to explain, and all the “professed enthusiasm” around her is simply “fake.” No substantiation or evidence for that assessment is included. Just the rankest of punditry. Pure opinion, as opposed to an actual argument. That’s what “electability” usually offers.

Not mentioned in this incredibly self-serving article is the fact that Douthat has been clamoring for a contested convention for months. He is also staunchly conservative and just called Trump, after the assassination attempt, a “man of destiny.” Douthat, who has claimed to be keeping his distance from MAGA since 2016, seems to be coming around to actively and openly supporting Trump.

Much of what makes “electability” talk so attractive to pundits is that it lets them conceal their own subjective interests and preferences by instead deploying a pseudo-objective metric. What it most often - and deliberately - obscures is an honest discussion about race and gender. No one who desires to be part of polite society wants to admit “I’m not comfortable with a Black woman” - just blame her supposedly weak “electability” instead.

The “electability” framework, unfortunately, tends to offer deflection even when race and gender are (tacitly) acknowledged as crucial concerns. It produces myriad variations of the “While *I* would totally vote for Harris, I don’t think *other people* will” non-argument. “Electability” remains an impossibly vague term that is more often than not invoked to lend legitimacy to someone’s personal preferences and biases, mixed with some subjective assumptions about other people’s biases.

How racist and sexist is America?

The Right will go all in on racist and sexist attacks against the Black woman that now stands between them and a return to power. In the immediate aftermath of Joe Biden’s announcement, they have struggled mightily to come up with a coordinated attack on Harris. But it doesn’t take much sophisticated analysis to prognosticate where they are headed. Campaigning in Ohio, JD Vance declared that “If you want to lead this country, you should feel grateful for it. You should feel a sense of gratitude. I never hear that gratitude come through when I listen to Harris.” They’re so ungrateful, those uppity minorities - always complaining when they should just shut up and accept their place!

It’s going to get much uglier from here. Already in 2020, the Right tried a little birtherism against Harris, something Trump eagerly helped propagate when she became Biden’s VP pick. Both of Harris’ parents immigrated to the United States. Which is entirely irrelevant - unless it is not for an enthno-nationalist movement that wants to get rid of birthright citizenship so that they can redraw the boundaries of the body politic in a way that would only include “authentic” (white conservative Christian) Americans. This time, expect a lot of talk about Harris as the DEI candidate who doesn’t deserve to be the nominee and got to this position solely because of her identity, at the expense of people far more qualified. The MAGA freaks at Newsmax are already there - this is bound to become a key talking point across the Right.

At first sight, the “DEI” attack might seem less aggressive than the nasty birtherism. But in many ways, it is more insidious. The anti-DEI crusade has always been a campaign to taint and disavow any person of color, especially women of color, in a position of power and influence, declaring them universally unqualified for their position, claiming they have gotten to where they are not through ability and achievement, but because nefarious “woke” forces seek to overtake and undermine the American institutions. The political project underlying all the furor against DEI is one of purging and re-segregating elite spaces in order to restore white male domination and what the Right insists are “natural” hierarchies of race and gender.

While polite society widely treated birtherism, certainly in its most virulent anti-Obama variant, as a repulsive form of racism, the anti-DEI crusade has been fully normalized in mainstream political discourse. The trajectory from birtherism to the anti-DEI campaign does not signal progress, but points to the fact that the Right has figured out how to make the project of rolling back whatever progress towards integration and equality of elite spaces there has been more acceptable - and how to enroll the established media in laundering it for a broader audience.

Misogynoir unfiltered

I actually don’t think openly and aggressively flinging racist and sexist dreck at Kamala Harris is a good electoral strategy for the Right. They will do it anyway. The nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court in February 2022 offered an instructive example of what we might expect and what is animating the Right.

When Joe Biden publicly pledged to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court, conservative politicians, activists, and intellectuals certainly didn’t try to hide their disdain. It wasn’t just coming from the most extreme wing of the rightwing coalition: The conservative legal establishment, for instance, also vowed to fight against this “lesser Black woman,” as Ilya Shapiro, vice president of the Cato Institute at the time and now senior fellow at the far-right Manhattan Institute, infamously put it.

The alarmed, disgusted reactions were revealing precisely because they were so reflexive, so visceral. Misogynoir – anti-Black misogyny - formed the basis of this rightwing scorn. Rightwingers saw Biden’s announcement as an indication of how powerful the forces of liberalism, “wokeism,” and multiculturalism – those radically “Un-American” ideas that were threatening “real” (read: white Christian patriarchal) America – had already become. The fact that a reactionary majority would most likely continue to dominate the Supreme Court for a generation didn’t do much to alleviate these fears.

Reactionaries understood Biden’s announcement as evidence that the dreaded forces responsible for the general assault on white male rule kept ascending within America’s institutions. Whether or not it had any immediate effect on the Court’s decisions, for a movement centered around the idea that America is a white Christian patriarchal nation, a place where white Christian men have a Right to dominate, a Black woman rising inevitably presented a threat.

Kentanji Brown Jackson’s nomination represented an affirmation of multiracial pluralism. It was an acknowledgment that the traditional dominance of white men was never the result of meritocratic structures, but of a discriminatory system, and that it was time to dismantle that system. It will help redefine what the American political, social, and cultural elite looks like – reshaping ideas in the collective imaginary of the nation of who gets to be at the top. That’s exactly what the Right fears.

A reckoning that never has been

The skepticism towards Harris, to use a charitable term, extends far beyond the Right, however - it is pervasive among the nation’s self-regarding moderates, centrists, and even Liberals; it is so powerful among the donor class, the establishment media, and the elite punditry from center-right to center-left that very few of those who have been emphatically making the case against Joe Biden were willing to even acknowledge the fact that in the event of the president stepping back, the obvious and most logical choice by far was to make Kamala Harris the Democratic candidate.

“Why have they been hiding Kamala?” my mother has been asking. While I’m not sure “hiding” is the right term, this is still a good question. And I believe the answer has a lot to do with a much broader shift in the political, societal, and cultural climate since the summer of 2020, when Harris emerged as Biden’s VP pick: It points us to how much of a reactionary retrenchment we have experienced, and how much social, racial, and gender progress have come to be viewed as “woke” radicalism that has supposedly gone too far - a position shared not just on the Right, but also by a sizable portion of the Biden coalition as well.

There was a moment towards the end of Trump’s presidency when it might have seemed like a leap forward was possible. In the summer of 2020, during the mass protests after the public murder of George Floyd, a racial reckoning appeared feasible, perhaps – there was hope that the nation would finally address the systems that keep producing such horrible violence.

The protests were not only bigger, but also broader and more diverse than previous instances of anti-racist mobilization. For a while, at least, mainstream America seemed largely on board, as indicated by public perceptions of the Black Lives Matter movement. When BLM started in 2013/14, it was broadly unpopular among white Americans. But as racial attitudes generally moved left, specifically in the late Obama era and then during Trump’s reign, BLM’s popularity rose and then exploded during the summer of 2020. At that point, around two thirds of Americans approved of BLM and supported BLM-led protests.

Kamala Harris seemed like the perfect VP candidate in that moment. A woman of color, daughter of immigrants, highly qualified and accomplished, who rose to elite status through her abilities and determination, in a Democratic Party that wanted to tell the world: Yes, we are indeed the party of multiracial pluralism, that is our promise!

But the racial reckoning never materialized. There are several reasons why there has been so little structural change since. One is the fact that the George Floyd protests sparked a significant radicalization of the Right – a kind of racial counter-reckoning, as Hakeem Jefferson and Victor Ray have argued. This found its emblematic expression in the manufactured anti-“CRT” panic that took off in the fall of 2020. It also manifested in an escalation of red-state legislation intended to roll back fundamental rights for traditionally marginalized groups, a full-on assault on public education, and far-reaching attempts to censor and purge anything and anyone daring to deviate from a white nationalist understanding of the country’s past and present.

As with so many aspects of rightwing politics in the Trump era, these initiatives are not simply a departure from a venerable conservative project that ended in 2016 – but they do represent an exacerbation of long-standing tendencies; they build on anti-democratic traditions on the Right – while also constituting a significant radicalization. Recent political and societal events have dramatically heightened the sense of being under siege that has always characterized the modern conservative movement and the reactionary Right. The first one was the election and re-election of the first Black president to the White House, a symbol of the threat to the “natural” order of white dominance. The summer of 2020 further escalated this perception of imminent danger: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to regard the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as irrefutable proof that radically “Un-American” forces of “woke” extremism were rising, that “the Left” had started its full-on assault.

But it’s not just rightwing resistance that prevented a more significant racial reckoning to emerge from the summer of 2020. Once Trump was no longer president, a widespread longing on the center-right to center-left for a return to pre-Trump “normalcy” overwhelmed and drowned out many supposedly more “radical” calls for change. That was also, especially after the the assault on the Capitol, Biden’s promise and the philosophy that animated his incoming administration: Leave the Trump chaos behind, return the country to “normalcy,” restore unity.

“Normalcy,” in U.S. history, has never entailed a racial reckoning, however, but rather a combination of ignoring, upholding, and complying with the discriminatory status quo. And it has entailed the delegitimization of demands for progressive change as too much, too soon, too radical. Since the summer of 2020, we have been cycling through a series of reactionary discourses, often launched by the extremist Right, but always entertained, legitimized, and perpetuated by the mainstream: “Critical Race Theory,” “wokeism,” “cancel culture,” “DEI” - all claiming, essentially, that things have gone too far, that America has shot past the Goldilocks zone of just the right amount of racial and social progress to which it needs to return asap.

The racial reckoning that seemed possible, perhaps, in the summer of 2020, did not come – instead a counter-reckoning has been gaining steam. Counter-reckoning might also be the right term to describe what is happening in the realm of gender attitudes and politics. We are experiencing a moment of anti-feminist counter-mobilization and gender retrenchment – call it the post-#MeToo backlash, fueled by anti-feminist grievance.

It has all added up to a pervasive sense among the nation’s elites, very much including many self-regarding moderates and Liberals, that “woke” radicalism urgently needs to be reined in. It had been given too much rope during the Trump era, during the mass protests in the summer of 2020, specifically, when most of the mainstream elite felt compelled, momentarily, to lend its support to an uprising. But to those at the top, uprisings are dangerous, always. The prevailing view on the center, quickly after the 2020 election, was that the clock needed to be turned back, to a time before what they saw as the leftwing excesses of the recent past.

And as the country’s elites went from briefly joining and/or getting caught up in the plea, as desperate as it was euphoric, for a truly egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic America to regrouping around the fear of the excesses of “woke” radicalism, the perspective on Kamala Harris changed. All of a sudden, she represented not the invincible promise of a multiracial, gender-progressive coalition, but the antithesis of a theory that postulated the Democrats urgently needed to correct course. Harris went from embodying the pluralistic vision the Democratic Party sought to claim to being regarded, by a cadre of pundits, insiders, and operatives, a liability and someone who stood in the way of returning what the Democrats, in this interpretation, should have been doing all along: Focus on the “moderate” (predominantly white, predominantly male) voter and their / his interests and sensibilities. Stay away from “culture war” topics (as if they weren’t actually civil rights issues), talk about social and racial justice as little as possible, don’t do anything to provoke “backlash.” Better not feature the Black woman VP too much then…

A manifestly unfit, unqualified, vindictive wannabe-dictator who leads a coalition in which rightwing extremists are fully in charge and want to impose a radically reactionary agenda on the country against majority will vs a totally normal, perfectly qualified, utterly non-radical liberal politician who leads a broad coalition that is committed to continuing constitutional self-government towards a pluralistic democracy. That’s where we are. With a little bit of luck, the Right’s racist, sexist attacks on Harris will not only repulse just enough people and keep them from voting for Trump. They may also get some people who consider themselves part of a small-d democratic coalition to reconsider what all this raging against “DEI” and “woke” identity politics that has been so thoroughly normalized in the American political discourse that it is now ubiquitous in the opinion pages of the nation’s leading newspapers and magazines is actually all about. The Right will inevitably smear Kamala Harris as a “woke” radical and a DEI president. It should serve as a reminder not only of who these people really are, but also of how disastrously far the forces of social and racial retrenchment have been allowed to advance and define the political debate.

And if all this aggressively racist, sexist ugliness doesn’t get a majority of the electorate to side against Trump - well, that would also be a reckoning of some kind. The world will be watching, anxiously.