Her manufactured stardom is the final test for liberal groupthink.
Her manufactured stardom is the final test for liberal groupthink.
K amala Harris dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary before a single vote could be cast. She had pledged to sign the Green New Deal. She had talked up radical bail reform. She encouraged donations to a bail-reform group that released violent criminals, including sex offenders, back onto the streets. She entertained the idea of restoring voting rights even to confined terrorists. She refused to rule out packing the Supreme Court. She wanted to defund the police. She announced her pronouns.
She was committed to every fashionable left-wing cause in a year of left-wing hysteria. And so she was a darling of the press, which sees itself as the superintendent of the latest political trends. Voters — particularly black voters — ended up picking Joe Biden in a near-explicit repudiation of progressive mob politics and of the craven leaders, such as Harris, who were auditioning by standing in front of the law-degree-holding Molotov-cocktail brigades that year.
That she is being foisted on Democratic voters with just 100 days to go before the election should be seen as a form of ideological punishment and discipline meted out by elite Democrats to their voters. It doesn’t feel that way only because Biden was dying on the debate stage and in the polls. Free of the Biden burden, Democrats have cut their overwhelming feeling of relief with a few choice precursor media narratives to rebrand their mood change as a form of euphoria. We love “brat.” We love coconuts. Kamala Harris is funny. Kamala Harris is serious about governing. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
And yet, for all the professed enthusiasm, the polls are roughly where they were before the debate — before Joe Biden was put in political cryogenic hibernation.
Perhaps the only reason this step change works is that key Democratic constituencies are already addicted to mood-altering drugs as a means of coping with reality. Obamacare turns out not to be a health-care plan but an instrument for politically controlling the Democratic Party, dosing out whatever it takes to get the patient through the present bloody surgery.
Kamala Harris is a new skin suit stretched over the unimpressive record of the Biden administration. The skin suit can talk, but it has to defend not only everything Kamala Harris said in 2020 but also everything Biden did and continues to preside over now — whether it’s an economy that has squeezed the last bit of hope of home-ownership out of young Millennials and Gen-Zers, or the transformation of the Democratic coalition into a safe encampment for the Hamas-kids of Columbia University, or a mainly unconstitutional Court-packing scheme.
Kamala Harris is the final test for liberal groupthink. Her sudden Taylor Swift–level stardom is as faked as intelligence-agency assessments of Hunter Biden’s laptop. If the Kamala Harris psyop proves a success this November, prepare for even wilder social-programming experiments in the future.