Paul Sancya/AP Photo
Vice President Kamala Harris accepts the party’s presidential nomination on the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Kamala Harris has been a great and happy surprise. There wasn’t much in her past performances that suggested she could command the world’s highest public stage with the comfort, the spirit, the affability and competence she has demonstrated in recent weeks. Even more, there wasn’t much that suggested she could command it with the authority she exuded last night.
For this transformation, I can suggest several reasons. The first is the change in the Democratic Party itself, for which the party’s base, the party’s millennials, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and above all Joe Biden get a lot of credit. Together, they have created a new ideological center, a kind of commonsense social democracy that has freed Harris from what so burdened her in her short-lived 2020 presidential campaign (so short-lived that it actually never made it into 2020).
This year, Harris no longer has to toggle between left and center, an awkward balancing act she was not able to pull off in 2019. The slow-growing awareness that our 40-year romance with the market has produced an astounding upward redistribution of income and wealth, and has devastated whole sectors of the national economy, has yielded a new center-left synthesis that shaped the agendas of such previously not-so-left mainstream Democrats as Joe Biden and Tim Walz. The breadth and power of that center-left synthesis was evident in the forceful and heartfelt addresses that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren delivered to the convention, and in the rapturous reception they received from delegations that had been pledged to Joe Biden just five weeks ago.
That synthesis calls on the state to intervene not so much to help particular minorities as the entire working and middle class, in the form of aid to families with kids, provision of paid medical and family leave, making child care and college affordable, boosting both housing creation and housing builder creation through apprenticeship programs, kick-starting American industries (green where at all possible), and enhancing workers’ rights. The state needs to fund this by taxing the rich and curtailing some of the power of our globe-trotting (i.e., America-fleeing) corporations.
This is a markedly different left from the one that has flourished on some campuses over the past several decades and that became an irresistible kick-me sign for the American right. It isn’t woke, whatever “woke” may have been. It is soundly majoritarian, with majoritarian backing by the evidence of innumerable polls. Joe Biden wasn’t really up to the task of promoting it, though it came together on his watch. But it now provides a foundation for Harris’s domestic and economic policies, as well as a contrast to the pro-plutocratic giveaways that are the core of Trumponomics. It particularly anchors her advocacy of the care economy, which is now one of the party’s foremost ways to promote its family values. Talking about that economy, championing it, and illustrating why we need it is all totally within Harris’s political and personal comfort zone.
Harris no longer has to toggle between left and center, an awkward balancing act she was not able to pull off in 2019.
The “care economy,” to be sure, can sound somewhat feminine, reinforcing impressions that the Democrats are the mommy party and the Republicans the daddy. Hence Kamala’s taking on the mantle last night of toughest guy on the block (at least, when the other guy on the block is Trump) when it comes to defending America’s interests and values on the world stage. I suppose every aspiring female head of government has to unleash, or that failing, create her inner Maggie Thatcher to convince voters—male voters in particular—that she won’t let their country be pushed around. (This is not to suggest that Harris has any of Thatcher’s neo-imperialist bellicosity.) Kamala’s challenge was made easier by the fact that Trump has shown no interest in defending American values abroad, or any sign that he even knows what they are. His romancing of autocrats—because, as Harris noted, he yearns to be one himself—opens the door for her to campaign as the linchpin of the coalitions of the world’s democracies. In fact, the passages of the speech that she delivered most emphatically were those in which she pledged continued aid to Ukraine, continued opposition to Iran, and, navigating these vows with exquisite care, support for both Israel and Palestine.
But then, her life story, as she and others recounted it, emphasizes those two qualities—caring and strength—above any others. Moving a school friend who was being sexually molested into the Harrises’ home, and deciding to be a prosecutor. Representing victimized teens in court and putting their abusers away. Greatly increasing the Child Tax Credit and shoring up NATO. Allowing for all the compromises and conflicting interests that complicate a politician’s career, this seems to be who Kamala actually is, and certainly who she campaigns as: the empath warrior. Electorally, as well as in office, it could turn out to be a pretty potent package.
Harris devoted more of her speech to a critique of her opponent than is customary in nominees’ acceptance speeches, but that was entirely warranted and entirely necessary. The central issue of this campaign, if not necessarily the central focus of the Democrats’ ads, is, of course, the threat Trump poses to American democracy.
“Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again,” she said. “Consider his explicit intent to set free the violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol. His explicit intent to jail journalists. Political opponents. Anyone he sees as the enemy. His explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens.” Trump being an almost endless source of expressed authoritarian impulses, there was a good deal more in this vein.
By contrast, Harris’s recitation of her own domestic program didn’t attain anything like this level of specificity. “We will create what I call an opportunity economy,” she said. “An opportunity economy where everyone has a chance to compete and a chance to succeed. Whether you live in a rural area, small town, or big city. As President, I will bring together: Labor and workers, small business owners and entrepreneurs, and American companies. To create jobs. Grow our economy. And lower the cost of everyday needs. Like health care. Housing. And groceries. We will: Provide access to capital for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders. We will end America’s housing shortage. And protect Social Security and Medicare.” On restoring reproductive freedoms, of course, she was a good deal more concrete.
In a speech like this, there’s really no need to go a lot deeper on economic policy than she did in that passage; the important thing was to make clear whose side she is on, as countless convention speakers did by recounting her career, and whose side Trump is on (Trump’s), a task that countless convention speakers and Harris herself documented with suitable relish.
Republicans plainly hope they can link Harris to all that vexed them in Biden’s record—real, exaggerated, and imagined. But the tone and spirit of Harris’s campaign has marked such a sharp break with Biden, as does her age, gender, and race, that that link may be harder to make than Republicans hope. The slogan “We’re not going back” refers not just to the antediluvian strictures that Republicans want to impose on American freedoms and Enlightenment values, and not just to the slanders and lies in which Trump daily trafficked, but also to what many Americans viewed as an unwatchable cage match of two out-of-shape relics. Though she and the Democrats are profoundly indebted to Biden for his crucial role in creating that center-left synergy that unifies the Democrats and underpins her campaign, Harris can still run on Biden’s policies and yet stand for a break from both Trump and Biden rather than a continuation of Biden and his works. Simply by virtue of who she is, she’s already doing that.
