The Surprise Guest

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, August 23, 2024

 

The Dispatch Slack channel came alive on Thursday evening as rumors swirled about a “surprise guest” set to appear during the evening’s Democratic convention program.

 

Everyone agreed that the guest would have to be someone of unusual stature given that he or she would share top billing with Kamala Harris. But opinion split over whether that meant a Republican elder statesman or a mega-celebrity.

 

Would it be George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney to deliver the ultimate cross-party endorsement? Or would it be Taylor Swift and/or Beyonce to electrify casual voters?

 

Or would it be both, with Dubya and Taylor dueting on “Look What You Made Me Do”?

 

At some point, a mischievous White House staffer tweeted a “bee” emoji, implying that Beyoncé would be making an appearance. Then the gossip site TMZ reported that the singer would perform, citing “multiple sources in the know.”

 

She didn’t. Beyoncé wasn’t there. Neither was Swift, Bush, or Cheney. No major celebrities showed. The highest-ranking Republican to speak was former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, whose appearance was scheduled.

 

But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a “surprise guest”—there was. It was Kamala Harris.

 

A month after she became her party’s nominee, the sense of surprise at how it happened still hasn’t fully worn off. And the ecstatic reception she’s received from her party has the distinct feel of a red carpet being rolled out for a particularly honored arrival. The left yearned for a candidate other than Old Man Biden and then, against all odds, they had one. Harris, the surprise guest of this campaign, has received the most lavish hospitality Democrats can offer.

 

Even progressives couldn’t get motivated to pee in the punchbowl.

 

There was something else surprising about Harris last night, too. She’s been considerably better as a retail politician and as a strategist than we thought she’d be.

 

By “we,” I mean “me.” The day after Joe Biden quit the race, I described Harris as a below-replacement-level substitute. That assessment was fair at the time given what I’d seen of her since she ran for president in 2019. And in my defense, those who know her best seemed to agree: Biden was reportedly known to tell advisers that “Kamala can’t win,” which may or may not have been his way of talking himself into staying in the race.

 

But he, and I, underestimated her. Harris has been stronger on the stump than the hapless candidacy of five years ago portended. She showed real charisma on Thursday night in her speech accepting the Democratic nomination, something I never would have believed her capable of.

 

The biggest surprise from the surprise guest this week, though, was the strategic shrewdness she displayed in making her convention sound and sometimes even look … Republican. Harris seems to understand that there are many millions of Americans who’d prefer a more culturally conservative politics yet are hesitant to hand the government over (again) to a boorish lunatic obsessed with “retribution.” They don’t like Donald Trump, but they don’t like “wokeness” either.

 

Neither do I, Harris seemed to be signaling with her convention program, sincerely or not. On Thursday night, she and her party leaned into the political realignment that Trump and his movement instigated.

 

Put out more flags.

 

As the day wore on, chatter in the Dispatch Slack shifted from speculating about which song Tay Tay would play to why it felt like we were watching a Republican convention circa 2012.

 

From the candidate herself there were promises of tax cuts and an “opportunity economy,” vows of staunch support for NATO and Israel, and condemnations of appeasers in the other party who cozy up to dictators. “I know the importance of safety and security, especially at our border,” Harris claimed. Under my leadership, she went on to say, America will have “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

 

There was praise for the late John McCain from Arizona Senate candidate Ruben Gallego, keen to capitalize on an opportunity gifted to him by his dopey Republican opponent. At another point this week, there were high-school football players (well, former high-school football players) in their jerseys onstage. More than once, a uniformed cop addressed the crowd—with one drawing applause by noting that “crime is down and police funding is up.”

 

All week, from multiple speakers, there was talk of “freedom.” In hindsight, it’s actually too bad that Bush didn’t attend; rhetorically, he would have felt right at home.

 

When Kinzinger spoke, he assured the viewing audience that Democrats are just as patriotic as Republicans, inspiring chants of “USA” in the convention hall that recurred at other points in the program. The camera repeatedly panned around the arena to show thousands of attendees waving American flags.

 

When the parents of an American hostage held by Hamas took the stage a few days ago, the crowd greeted them warmly and chanted, “Bring them home!”

 

At no point in her address did Harris note that she would be the country’s first woman president if elected, cutting a contrast with the last Democrat to seek that distinction. Instead, she sought common ground with all voters by calling on them “to uphold the awesome responsibility that comes with the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American.”

 

Pride in being … an American? At a Democratic convention? 

 

Whatever your specific objections to “woke” progressive cultural politics happen to be, Democrats had an olive branch for you at the convention. They even quietly dropped abolishing capital punishment from their policy platform. President Harris, the former prosecutor, is apparently preparing to hang ‘em high.

 

“Incredible to watch Democrats hijack symbols and terms from the conservative handbook, only to empty them of all content and wear them around like a costume,” an irritated Ben Shapiro grumbled. Hijacking conservatism is a privilege reserved for proto-fascist New Right coup enthusiasts, it seems.

 

But Shapiro’s point isn’t even correct on its own terms. Hardly anything the Democrats offered with respect to policy this week was “conservative” in the traditional sense of the term. Reaganite conservatism has always sought to shrink government in order to maximize liberty. Apart from dangling tax cuts at the middle class, Harris and her allies don’t want to shrink anything.

 

What they’re actually hijacking, weirdly enough, are the trappings of nationalism associated with Trump’s movement. There are exceptions: Harris’ solidarity with NATO and Ukraine is obviously out of step with the isolationist “America First” faction. But in broad strokes, pairing a robust welfare state with outspoken patriotism and traditional symbols of American strength—flags, cops, football, a “lethal” military, the death penalty for bad guys when circumstances warrant—is pretty darned Trumpy.

 

Liberal economic policy and culturally conservative social policy is the secret sauce of nationalism, right? The modern Democratic Party will never approach a truly conservative social agenda, but they can certainly be somewhat more conservative than they’ve been over the past decade. And that’s what they were this week.

 

There’s strategic logic to that.

 

Persuading the persuadables.

 

The basic strategy is straightforward. Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful Democrat in America, summed it up when she assured Politico that Harris, if elected, would govern from the center as president. (Which is true, whether Harris wants to govern that way or not.) How can you be so sure, she was asked? “Because,” the former House speaker said, “that’s where the public is.”

 

That’s where the public is. More specifically, that’s where working-class voters and disaffected Republicans are, and each of those very important constituencies is up for grabs this year amid the political realignment that Trump and Trumpism have caused. Harris is betting that gestures toward cultural conservatism will attract both groups.

 

Working-class voters have been moving right. That’s partly due to inflation during the Biden years, but the “defund the police” debacle of 2020 scared enough of them away to have almost cost Democrats the presidency, the Senate, and the House during a cycle in which they were supposed to clean up. Harris is desperate to put that behind her and erase Trump’s “law and order” advantage. That’s how we ended up with cops onstage at the convention and with the nominee herself touting her career as a prosecutor, a subject she avoided in 2019.

 

Disaffected Republicans, meanwhile, might be open to moving left. The sort of people who voted for Nikki Haley in this year’s primary dislike Trump and what he represents, but partisanship remains a high psychological hurdle to clear. If you’ve lived your life despising the left as a horde of flag-burning, freedom-hating peaceniks, it doesn’t logically follow that your contempt for the new Republican Party requires strange new respect for the old Democratic Party.

 

That’s how we ended up with Adam Kinzinger onstage at the convention celebrating Democrats as the closest thing left to a conservative party and the nominee herself sounding hawkish abroad and effusive about “freedom” at home.

 

I think Harris calculated that a culturally conservative-ish pageant celebrating American patriotism this week could retard the working-class trend toward the right and accelerate the disaffected-Republican trend toward the left. For the latter, the flag-waving and chants of “USA!” might make the Democratic Party feel less foreign. For the former, it might prove that Harris shares their admiration for the land of opportunity and their disdain for progressive anti-Americanism.

 

“What stands out to me over the past month, culminating at the convention,” conservative lobbyist Liam Donovan wrote, “is Harris/Ds conspicuously seeking to create a permission structure for people who wouldn’t ordinarily vote for her at the very time Trump plays jenga with one that had built up for him over the past year.” Gestures toward patriotism and law and order are the permission structure.

 

To put it differently, perhaps the actual surprise guest at the convention was a new, less culturally adversarial Democratic Party—or at least one that’s extremely eager to be perceived that way. When Harris talks about a “new way forward,” she’s not talking about economic or foreign policy. She’s talking about the national mood and her party’s role in improving it.

 

Which is politically interesting for a few reasons. 

 

Most obviously, insofar as that perception takes hold, it’ll offset some of the special liabilities Harris might carry as a candidate. A black woman from San Francisco whose opponent is constantly calling her a communist has her work cut out for her to convince some Trump-curious voters that she’s as American as they are. Wrapping herself in the flag and associating herself with masculine symbols like cops and football players are her attempt to reassure middle America that a country led by a liberal woman won’t be “soft.”

 

But the new Democratic Party, such as it is, is also interesting as a contrast to the new Republican Party under Trump.

 

The party of change, and of the status quo.

 

The Bulwark’s Tim Miller summarized Democrats’ convention pitch this way: “We love America as it is and want to do the work to make it better for everyone. [Republicans] hate America as it is and would be happy to tear it apart to make Donald Trump’s life better.”

 

That’s a wildly disorienting inversion of how the two parties have operated for most of my life. Traditionally, it’s been the left whose patriotism is conditional. They love the America that can be if only they’re able to take power and enact their agenda. But America as it is? Racist, sexist, economically exploitative. Not something worth cheering.

 

Republicans, by contrast, were the love-it-or-leave-it party, priding themselves on their steadfast patriotism relative to the fickle left.

 

On Thursday night, the script flipped. Trump has spent nine years “s—t talking” the United States, to borrow a technical term from the governor of Pennsylvania. He loves the America that can be if he returns to power but routinely speaks of the country as it is in apocalyptic terms and excitedly celebrates when it receives bad news. His approach is the same as the left’s: If his faction can’t rule, America doesn’t deserve to survive.

 

Now, suddenly, here comes Kamala Harris heralding “the greatest privilege on Earth: the privilege and pride of being an American.”

 

Beyond tantalizing working-class voters and disaffected Republicans, that sort of language accomplishes a neat trick. In one sense, it makes Democrats the party of the status quo: If you too love America as it is, not merely as it might be if your side gets to put its most radical plans into action, she’s your candidate more so than Trump is.

 

But it also positions her as the candidate of change, which is no mean feat for someone who’s been vice president since 2021. Strategically, the whole point of her ignoring policy thus far and straining to focus voters on “vibes” is to draw a sharp contrast with Trump that favors her heavily. If the election is a choice between “joy” and patriotism on the one hand and “retribution” and s—t talking America on the other, who do you think wins?

 

“Our nation with this election has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past,” Harris told viewers last night, plainly referring to Trump. If you approach the race from a policy standpoint, she’s the incumbent and he’s the change candidate. But if you approach it as she suggests, from the perspective of which of them is more likely to find a “new way forward” from this juvenile, dispiriting, destabilizing era in American politics, it’s the other way around.

 

If you can position yourself simultaneously as the status-quo candidate with respect to stuff people like, like patriotism, and the change candidate with respect to stuff that they don’t, like dour low-brow demagoguery, that’s pretty impressive. As I said, Harris is better than replacement-level after all.

 

Say this much for Trump, though: He’s remained formidable enough politically to have forced Democrats toward his positions on policy matters like immigration and toward his positions on cultural matters like support for law and order. Harris is now trying to beat him by offering what we might describe as a kinder, gentler nationalism, with some of the same bells and whistles but waaaaay less tribalism.

 

That’s pretty impressive too. Perhaps the real surprise guest at this week’s convention, at least in spirit, was Trump himself.