This is Noah Rothman filling in for Jim Geraghty one more time this week.
On the menu today: Do Democrats even remember what the “Sister Souljah moment” was? To judge from the initial reactions to Kamala Harris’s scolding of a heckler from a Detroit rally stage on Wednesday night, it doesn’t seem like it.
Indecision Isn’t Courage
Midway through Harris’s stump speech, the vice president was interrupted by protesters shouting slogans associated with the anti-Israel protest movement. In one conspicuously fluid motion, Harris departed from the script and, without taking a breath, castigated her tormentors — not for their moral vacuity but merely for their imprudence.
“You know what?” Harris asked. “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” For this, the crowd went wild, as did some in the commentariat.
“Everyone has been asking the Democrats for a Sister Souljah moment,” the center-left economics commentator Noah Smith observed. “Well, here you go.” How generous. Truly, a gracious dispensation on the vice president’s part.
To be fair, Harris’s intended targets in the left-wing ecosystem intuited that they had been thrown under the bus. But an aside from the rally stage criticizing the anti-Israel/pro-Hamas demonstrators on style rather than substance does not make for a Sister Souljah moment. This wasn’t a repudiation — it was crowd work.
The original Sister Souljah moment was a genuine act of bravery on Bill Clinton’s part in the summer of 1992. Clinton didn’t deliver a glancing blow. He dwelled for two-and-a-half minutes on the unacceptability of the language used by the rap artist Sister Souljah, who had said that the systematic murder of white people would be justified as some perverse kind of karmic comeuppance.
It wasn’t just Clinton’s target but the venue in which he delivered his remarks that made it such an enduring political event. After all, the artist herself, Lisa Williamson, had only recently spoken before the very group Clinton was addressing, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. It was an extended rebuke, all while Jackson sat with a drawn face and his eyes fixed on the horizon — an expression that revealed his discomfort.
No one had to debate Clinton’s intention in the aftermath of this departure from the form that was expected of him. By contrast, Harris’s remarks are subject to interpretation. And she seems to have deliberately cultivated that ambiguity.
According to the New York Times on Wednesday, just prior to the rally, Harris took a meeting with the activists who’d organized the “uncommitted” movement, the goal of which was to mobilize as many anti-Joe Biden votes as possible to send a signal to the president that his administration’s support for Israel could cost him the election in Michigan. “The leaders asked to meet with her about the embargo request” — the group has pushed for an embargo on sending arms to Israel — “and said she had indicated that she was open to it, and directed the two leaders to her staff,” the Times said.
A subsequent statement from the Harris campaign confirmed only that Harris “has prioritized engaging” with Americans from all walks of life, including the anti-Israel sort, but she “will always work to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.” You don’t have to subject this statement to exegesis to see shades of gray in it. How does Harris define “defend?” Is that limited to, say, merely providing ordnance for Israel’s Iron Dome batteries to intercept incoming rockets and artillery shells? Or does “defend” involve neutralizing the offensive capabilities of groups such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah?
Vagueness appears to serve Harris’s interests, which, as illustrated by her choice of running mate, are to pacify, if not enthuse, every element of the Democratic coalition — no matter how odious those elements may be.
The fact that Harris is reportedly “open” to an Israeli arms embargo renders her impertinent chastisement of a heckler a non-event. To call it a Sister Souljah moment is an insult to Sister Souljah moments. The equivalent would be Bill Clinton calling out the Rainbow Coalition’s indiscretion while simultaneously organizing a committee to study the benefits of selectively liquidating white people.
Harris’s allies may have low expectations for her, but the rest of us should demand more.
Dueling Freedoms on the Campaign Trail
From the outset of her improbable campaign for the White House, Kamala Harris has emphasized what she claims is the “choice” presented to voters. Will America be a country “of chaos, of fear, of hate,” she asked in her introductory video, or can we “choose freedom?”
“Freedom” isn’t just the title of the Beyoncé tune that has become the Harris campaign’s unofficial anthem. Liberty is the broadest of the themes the Harris’s campaign is pushing. But her campaign’s definition of what constitutes “freedom” is complicated.
Liberty includes “the freedom to be safe from gun violence,” Harris said in that video. “The freedom to make decisions about your own body.” Harris stressed her support for her interpretation of freedom — which she broadened to include the “freedom to vote,” to “love who you love openly and with pride,” and to “join a union” — in a speech on Tuesday night.
Harris’s running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, echoed her sentiments. “Some of us are old enough to remember when it was Republicans who were talking about freedom,” said Walz. “It turns out now what they meant was the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office.” The Democratic Party’s vice-presidential nominee closed with a pearl of country wisdom. “In Minnesota,” Walz observed, “there’s a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”
If that is the rule in the North Star State, it’s one Walz did not observe. “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy,” Walz told MSNBC host Joy Reid, mangling both the Constitution and the jurisprudence around it. His record as an executive during the pandemic is hardly reflective of his supposed reverence for individual liberty. “In 2020,” Fox News reported, “Walz set up a COVID-19 hotline that allowed Minnesota residents to inform authorities about suspicions their neighbors may be violating lockdown measures.” Well into the summer of 2021, he ordered local police to issue citations to private individuals and businesses that didn’t adhere to his arbitrary restrictions on commercial activity, or gathered in suspect numbers, or failed to mask up (both indoors and out). He even has a few kind words for socialism, which fundamentally rejects the idea that private entities are more capable and competent judges of their own interests and that their individual pursuit of those interests contributes most efficiently to the general welfare.
The working definition of freedom on which Harris and Walz are operating conflicts with the word’s dictionary definition, in part because the progressive intellectual tradition from which they both hail places little value in individual agency. They can promote liberty while insisting upon state control of key private economic sectors, the empowerment of the public-health bureaucracy to manage individual choices, and even the government’s power to control what they regard as dangerous speech, because the freedom they cherish is more the “freedom to” than the “freedom from.”
Harris and Walz are hardly the first Democrats to try to sell the public on their understanding of what constitutes true freedom. In the winter of 2022–2023, California governor Gavin Newsom picked a fight with his Floridian counterpart, Ron DeSantis, along similar lines. In a campaign of taxpayer-funded advertisements, Newsom bombarded Florida residents with attacks on their governor’s claim that the Sunshine State served as a beacon of freedom. DeSantis’s ideal was not true freedom, Newsome alleged. Indeed, “Freedom is under attack in your state,” he said.
The advertisements landed with a thud, perhaps in part because a progressive’s definition of freedom diverges from the conventional American conception of liberty.
By being free to “join a union,” they mean that unions should be liberated to coerce workers into joining organized labor groups — or, at least, paying a portion of their salaries in dues to those groups, even if they don’t belong to them. “Freedom of choice” means freedom to have an abortion at nearly any stage of pregnancy, and little else. It does not mean, for example, the freedom to work in your preferred industry without first procuring a license from the state. The “freedom to be safe from gun violence” is only a euphemism to describe the act of restricting lawful access to firearms, not aggressively policing and prosecuting violent criminals.
When Democrats insinuate that Republicans are restricting your right to read the books you want, they mean that parents should not be able to determine whether school libraries have an obligation to limit minors’ access to pornographic material. When they claim that everyone should have the license to live how they like, they mean that the medical establishment should disregard the emerging consensus around the permanent and detrimental effects of surgical and hormonal treatments for gender dysphoria in children. And so on.
Progressivism’s vision of what constitutes freedom — freedom from want, from threat, from unfair competition, from accepted societal convention — is a testament to the legacy their intellectual forebearers bequeathed them. From Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life to Franklin Roosevelt’s unrealized “second Bill of Rights,” freedom is conceived not as a God-granted status but emancipation, as Croly put it, “from a condition of economic dependence.” Liberty must be clawed from the hands of the rapacious, manipulative plutocrats who would hoard it for themselves.
Progressives loyal to this tradition subscribe to what Isaiah Berlin described as a conception of freedom that is dependent on the presence of contributing factors — coercion or inducement, self-actualization, public-sector incentives, and the like — rather than the absence of limitations and obstacles that bar individuals from realizing their full potential. In that sense, freedom is something that someone else grants you — a good, a service, or a dispensation — whether they like it or not. They see liberty as something that is adulterated by oligarchical interests alone. But that’s a narrow outlook; majoritarianism and appeals to “the greater good” are as much threats to personal freedom as anything else.
I suspect voters will not be treated to a high-minded debate over the competing concepts of negative and positive liberties in this election cycle. The Harris campaign is leaning into the concept of freedom because it sounds good to American ears. We could, however, fairly say that the Democratic presidential ticket’s fealty to liberty is the price vice pays to virtue. It’s an acknowledgement that Americans, by and large, reject imperious interventions into their private affairs. That’s valuable, but it is also a smoke screen. Kamala Harris and her party may love freedom in the abstract, but they often seem to resent what it is you do with it.
ADDENDUM: In a savvy move, Donald Trump announced this morning that he will hold a “general news conference” with reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The former president is sure to make news at this event, and whatever he says will be the story. But the subtext of that story is his opponent’s steadfast refusal to expose herself to any circumstances in which she would have to speak extemporaneously at any length. The contrast between Trump’s free-wheeling accessibility and the tightly controlled environment in which Harris has cosseted herself is glaring and, increasingly, unfavorable to the Democratic presidential nominee.