The Left’s ascendancy has rendered the Democratic Party unrepresentative, uncompromising, and unsympathetic.
The Kamala Harris campaign’s “climate engagement director,” Camila Thorndike, made the classic mistake: She said aloud what she actually believed.
Remarks she recently provided to Politico Pro translated far beyond the paywall designed to reserve its content for “pros.” When it comes to fracking, Thorndike said, Harris “is not promoting expansion.” All the vice president has said is that she “wouldn’t ban fracking,” but she certainly hasn’t “promoted” the practice. Indeed, her aggressive approach to tackling issues related to climate change should suffice to convince even the skeptics of where her true passion is.
The display of insufficient enthusiasm for the instrument of American energy independence inspired a backlash, and Thorndike quickly retracted her remarks. “I didn’t explain myself clearly here,” she clarified. Harris “has not banned fracking, doesn’t support banning fracking, and in fact cast the tie-breaking vote on the biggest pro-climate law ever, which, yes, opened new fracking leases.”
If the clarification makes less logical sense than Thorndike’s initial comments, that’s only because it represents an unsuccessful attempt to force Harris’s ideological proclivities to comport with present political realities. Indeed, that has been the story of the race since Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket.
As I’ve written previously, Harris’s ungainly effort to restyle herself as a zealous convert to centrism and moderation does not suit her well because her heart isn’t in the game. She issues perfunctory statements renouncing all the works and views espoused by Kamala Harris circa 2019 because she has to. Fracking? She’s for it. Gun buy-back programs? A paranoid right-wing fantasy. “Gender-reassignment” surgery for federal inmates? That wasn’t her idea in the first place. The “Green New Deal” and its boundless ambition to remake the entire American economy and social compact? Her “values have not changed,” even if the policy preferences those values once informed have undergone a radical revision.
This has been a rote exercise on Harris’s part. It is fueled by her understanding that Biden’s legacy is a millstone around her neck. But Democrats should take the imperative voters have imposed on them to its logical conclusion. Why is Biden’s record such a drag on Democratic prospects today? Because, as Harris’s scramble to the center of American politics suggests, the president deferred to the progressive Left, and today, they regret it.
The tragicomic arc of Joe Biden’s presidency began with a successful triumph over the far Left in the 2020 Democratic primaries. It is set to end with both Biden’s and his successor’s legacies being consumed by voters who resent the degree to which the president failed to tame his party’s radical instincts. At every turn, Biden deferred to progressives and the ideas that emerge from the epistemologically cloistered redoubts they dominate.
Biden lobbied for and passed massive spending bills, the results of which would never match their promise. He argued for still larger raids on the U.S. Treasury that even his own party could not support. He baited the American people into believing that the “Inflation Reduction Act” would actually reduce inflation, only to admit later that it was a Trojan horse designed to shower green-energy companies with taxpayer-provided largess. He rarely missed an opportunity to assume the worst of his fellow citizens. He challenged the courts to stop him from executing illegal policies, and when they did, he attacked them for their impudence. From arrest-related killings of minorities to innocuous state-level election reforms to even outcomes engineered by the American justice system that he approved of — it was all evidence of America’s indelible original sin. Harris went along with it, even as it sapped her party of voters’ trust.
The through-line here is progressivism. The far-left governing program is electoral poison. What the progressive activist class wants for this country is not what a critical mass of general-election voters wants. Joe Biden won himself a mandate to communicate to this reckless constituency that they are but one part of a broader coalition, but he sacrificed that advantage when he became convinced that their grand ambitions matched his own.
Today, Harris is being crushed by the weighty baggage Biden bequeathed to her. But even the obvious and mounting evidence of the degree to which the progressive enterprise is throttling the life out of this candidacy cannot convince Democrats to admit — even just to themselves — the real problem: The Left’s ascendancy has rendered their party unrepresentative, uncompromising, and unsympathetic. The activists led them astray.