America Is Moving Right. But for How Long?

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, October 19, 2024

 

Finally, some good news: “No Matter Who Wins, the US Is Moving to the Right,” reads the headline of David Weigel’s recent piece in Semafor. Nor is Weigel the only one who’s noticed. Listen to Kamala Harris abandon her past positions, watch Democratic ads on television, or read the latest polling, and the trend line is clear. The Democratic Party is scrambling to catch up with an electorate that has moved to the right on energy, immigration, crime, and gender identity. Five years ago, as a candidate for the Democratic nomination, Harris catered to the social-justice Left. Now she tells Oprah she’ll shoot intruders with her Glock. That’s what I call progress.

 

The turnaround is sudden. Having secured the presidential nomination without winning a single primary and with three months to go before Election Day, Harris was forced to improvise. Gone was the candidate who wanted to abolish private health insurance, decriminalize border crossings, ban fracking, phase out the internal-combustion engine, and close private prisons. A new Harris was born. When she couldn’t ignore her earlier policies, she repudiated them.

 

Today Harris says that if she’s elected, current health-care arrangements will remain in place. She’ll work with Congress to build the southern border wall and reduce illegal immigration. Fracking will continue, but electric-vehicle mandates might not. She’ll keep sending military aid to Ukraine and defend America and Israel against Iran. Her legislative agenda will use the tax code to redistribute wealth to first-time homebuyers, small businesses, and parents. Republicans will sit in her cabinet. The business sector will influence her administration.

 

This isn’t Build Back Better. It’s Build Back Barely, as circumstances allow.

 

And circumstances are not good for the Left. Four years of the Biden presidency have diminished Bernie Sanders and the democratic socialist “Squad.” The revolutions of 2016 and 2020 belong in the past. Sanders hopes that Harris doesn’t mean what she says. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez grows comfortable in the party establishment. Two “Squad” members lost Democratic primaries. Harris brags that Goldman Sachs is on her side.

 

In 2011, ahead of his reelection campaign, Barack Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kan., to attack the malefactors of great wealth. Now Harris tacks right and defends the establishment against Donald Trump.

 

Why? Because she has no other choice. The polling doesn’t look good. All depends on Harris’s ability to sweep Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Pennsylvania depends on fracking, and Philadelphia has experienced a rise in social disorder. Michigan voters (like voters elsewhere) are leery of electric vehicles. Wisconsin is Harris’s best Rust Belt state — but there too she must confront an electorate unhappy with the economy, worried about crime, and angry at incumbent Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin.

 

President Biden misread the 2020 election result. He took his narrow win — decided by 44,000 votes across Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — and bare House and Senate majorities as a mandate to govern like FDR and LBJ. Biden not only saw a chance to enter the progressive hall of fame. He assumed that the electorate’s rejection of Donald Trump the man was a rejection of Donald Trump’s policies. Rarely has a president been so wrong.

 

The more money Biden and Congress spent to goose the economy, the more his economic-approval ratings fell. The more Biden restricted oil and gas development and subsidized non-carbon-based energy, the more voters blanched at the so-called green-energy transition. The more Biden’s administration promoted DEI and gender ideology, the more voters associated Democrats with cultural radicalism. Independents, labor, Latinos, and black men drifted rightward. The party’s grip on power weakened.

 

Look no further than the stunning change in the politics of immigration. Trump’s immigration policies were dogged by bipartisan criticism and opposition. Then Biden entered office and reversed Trump, and for three and a half years millions of immigrants crossed the southern border illegally. Result? In February, the border wall earned majority support. In July, Gallup reported that 55 percent of Americans want overall immigration decreased. That’s the highest level since 9/11.

 

Facts on the ground shape public opinion. And public opinion shapes Kamala Harris. As senator, she likened ICE to the KKK. As nominee for president, she calls for more border agents. It’s surreal. It’s audacious. It might even work.

 

That’s because there is one issue on which the public has not moved right during the Biden presidency: abortion. The number of Americans who identify as pro-choice has increased since 2022, when the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and sent abortion policy back into the political sphere. Support for abortion rights remains high, with 63 percent of Americans saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases. When voters have been presented with a binary choice, they have opted to codify or expand abortion rights.

 

Harris’s logic is simple. Eke out a win by play-acting as a moderate on Trump’s best issues, while pressing her advantage on abortion. Trust that the gender gap will work in her favor. Rely on the vaunted Democratic ground game. Depend on Trump’s ceiling of support remaining at 47 to 48 percent.

 

I follow the reasoning. But I suspect voters see through the mirage. They have voted for many Democrats who campaigned as moderates and governed as liberals, and they inevitably wind up disappointed in the outcome. Why fall for it again with Harris? She might tiptoe toward the right, but her rhetoric is so vague, her manner so unconvincing, that the public continues to see her as undefined, unknown, inscrutable.

 

Either Harris will abandon her pose of centrism on Inauguration Day, or she will lose, and Trump’s second term will revive and intensify the Resistance. Either way, our rightward turn may be short-lived. Enjoy it while it lasts.