The issues are the same as they’ve always been.
From the BBC:
Vice-President Kamala Harris pledged a “new way forward” for all Americans as she formally accepted the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday night, delivering a message of unity and urging voters to reject Donald Trump.
Leaving aside that, as the BBC swiftly concedes, Harris has not offered up any “way forward” at all, this phrase profoundly irritates me — and it always has. In a country such as the United States, there is no “new way forward.” There are the same questions that we have been arguing over for decades, and . . . that’s it. There’s no secret box marked “new ideas” that will change the paradigm. The questions are well leafed and well established.
In part, I mean this philosophically. I agree with Calvin Coolidge, who said in 1926:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
But I also mean this practically. Kamala Harris has assiduously declined to share what she would like to do with the power she seeks — and, insofar as she has made concessions on this point, she has said she agrees with the president with whom she serves — but, irrespective of her final set of answers, they will not be “new.” Harris will want either to expand the federal government relative to the states, or to shrink it; she will want to raise taxes, to cut them, or to combine the two; she will want to encourage abortion, to tolerate it, or to restrict it; she will want to impose tariffs, or to repeal them; she will want to shift power to the executive branch, or to return it to Congress; she will want to pick judges who hew to the original meaning of the Constitution, or to pick judges who do not; she will want to use the bureaucracy to micromanage the economy, or to deregulate; she will want to advance a muscular foreign policy, or to retrench; she will want to expand spending, to maintain spending, or to cut spending; she will want to impose more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, or to loosen those rules. And so on and so forth. I understand that the media and the DNC wish to present their candidate as something “fresh” (a hilarious conceit, given that she’s the incumbent VP), but the truth is that Kamala Harris is not, in fact, “fresh,” and her agenda — whatever it is — is not, in fact “new.” Nothing is. It all exists now. It has all been done before. It will all be done again. We are a 50–50 country for a reason. People know what’s on offer, and, as they have since the dawn of the republic, they know broadly on which side of the divide they stand.