By Rich Lowry
Tuesday,
October 29, 2024
We’ve passed
the peak of woke politics in the U.S., and the Harris for president campaign is
the leading indicator.
Of
all the things that Kamala Harris wants you to know about her — that she grew
up in a middle-class family, that she’s not Joe Biden, that she has a “to-do
list” for the American people — perhaps foremost among them is that she’s not
woke.
She
doesn’t have any rote line asserting this, but achieving distance from the
fashionable left-wing politics that defined the Trump years and their immediate
aftermath motivates much of what she says and does.
That
Harris now feels compelled to disavow so many of the ideas that she once
embraced is powerful testament to their political toxicity.
An
idea has won or lost in American politics when both parties favor or oppose it,
or simply don’t want to fight over it anymore. Ronald Regan’s economics truly
prevailed when the Democratic Party, via Bill Clinton in the early 1990s,
accepted his basic approach. Gay marriage won politically when Republicans
decided to stop talking about the issue.
By
this standard, woke attitudes and policies are in marked decline, and Kamala
Harris is Exhibit A.
Except
for her abortion radicalism, she’s turned her back on much of what she once
professed to believe or sympathize with.
Defund
the police? Absolutely not.
Abolish
ICE? No way.
DEI?
Haven’t heard of it.
Medicare
for all? That was a long time ago.
The
Green New Deal? Let’s not get carried away.
She
has backed off her extravagant positions on the trans issue and the border. She
now insists that rather than pushing the envelope on either, she simply wants
to follow the law. You could be forgiven for thinking the only pronouns she
knows are she/her and he/him.
Harris
doesn’t bring up identity politics at all. Not only does she not talk about the
once-ubiquitous concepts of white privilege or “equity,” she doesn’t even talk
about breaking the glass ceiling or the history-making nature of her candidacy.
Listening to her campaign, you’d have no idea that the twin -isms, racism and
sexism, have been consuming obsessions of the Left for years now.
There’s
also no hint of the hostility to law enforcement that characterized
progressivism with the rise of Black Lives Matter. No, Harris is a
Glock-wielding tough-as-nails prosecutor, who, you might have heard, is the
only person in the race who has prosecuted trans-national gangs.
This
is as complete a volte face as we’ve seen in recent American politics.
In
French Revolution terms, Harris once was a fellow-traveler with Robespierre,
the famous radical, but now is happy to go along with the Thermidorian Reaction
that toppled him.
It’s
as if William Jennings Bryan decided, after inveighing against them so
famously, that the gold standard and Eastern financial interests weren’t so bad
after all.
What
happened is that many Democratic politicians believed that the reaction to
Trump and the revulsion over the killing of George Floyd had fundamentally
reoriented American politics, and the hothouse leftism of college campuses
could be exported to the country at large. In reality, most people were never
onboard. Joe Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency in 2020 if he’d been woke,
and Kamala Harris wouldn’t be locked in a tight race now if she were still
running on her erstwhile causes.
By
no means does this suggest that woke priorities are on their way out. They are
still dominant in academia and in other elite institutions, and if she wins,
Harris could still pursue them.
Her
sincerity is neither here nor there, though. That a politician who marinated
for decades in progressive California and who once espoused or sounded
favorable to every single woke priority realizes that she can’t do so and
appeal to a majority of Americans speaks volumes. Harris doesn’t have great
political instincts, yet even she gets this.
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