The Soft Bigotry Of Kamala Harris’ Rise

by MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER & ALEX GUTENTAG

The Vice President Kamala Harris is the most qualified Democratic Party candidate to be America’s next president, and Democrats should unify around her, say President Joe Biden, the governors of California, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, Hillary and Bill Clinton, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and many other leading Democrats.

But Harris has no substantive vision and has not delivered results for the people. She is best known for her vacuous statements attempting to sound inspiring, such as her oft-used line, “what can be, unburdened by what has been.”

And Harris has a very poor track record, from her failure to control the border under Biden to her failure to make a significant dent against crime as San Francisco’s District Attorney or California’s Attorney General. Her record as a prosecutor was controversial and plagued by scandal. She did nothing of importance as a US Senator.

Of course, Harris could still win the Democratic nomination and defeat Trump. Young people are turning her incoherent statements into viral memes, and her campaign is embracing them. While the Democrats’ are transparently hypocritical to argue that Trump is too old to be president, it could resonate nonetheless with some voters. Harris could pull black voters back toward her and away from Trump, whose black support rose from nine to 20%. And Trump’s potential lack of discipline, which was on display in his overly long acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, could be his undoing.

But things don’t look good for Harris, either in the primary or the general. A new poll in multiple battleground states last week found that Harris had the same approval rating among black women as Biden. That poll found that 12% of black women and 24% of black men preferred Trump. If Democrats are divided, the case for deciding who the candidate is at the convention will grow stronger, not weaker. And Trump, who has shown some discipline, including staying quiet before the RNC, is poised to grow stronger in battleground states as his campaign starts to buy advertisements.

As such, even if Harris were to defeat Trump, it will likely be due to factors outside of her control. The bottom line is that Harris is an unpopular and thus weak candidate. She has no independent source of legitimacy beyond being promoted by the Party. Harris was an unpopular presidential candidate in 2020 whose support was in the single digits. She was an unremarkable and unmemorable Senator, DA, and AG.

How, then, did she end up in a position where she could become president of the United States? Why did the Democrats end up with such a weak and divisive presidential front-runner?

Coddling Kamala

One key reason why Harris has risen to the top of the Democratic Party is that, from her first moment in politics to today, she never faced any real opposition. She dated former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, and he appointed her to two paid state board positions before running for DA in 2003.

During Harris’ run for president in 2020, she played the victim. After Biden boasted of his ability to work with others, including segregationists, Harris said his comments were “hurtful to hear.” Harris said that she was particularly sensitive to such speech because she had, as a child, been bused to majority-white schools in order to reduce racial segregation.

Harris’ move to cast herself as a paragon of racial justice backfired when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard sharply criticized her record as a prosecutor in a debate. Harris proved unable to recover from Gabbard’s accusations.

Many Democrats enthusiastic about Harris compare her to Obama, but Obama is a gifted orator, and Harris struggles to speak confidently and resorts routinely to cliches, including ones she has used many times before.

However, the comparison to Obama is revealing. Democrats who support Harris appear to believe that what was special about Obama was simply that he was black. And so, at bottom, much of the Democratic Party support for Kamala is skin deep. Democrats who have supported Harris her whole career appear to think that her being half-black and a woman made her a unique and gifted politician.

Yet Harris is the opposite of unique. She rose to the top by conforming, not standing out. Throughout her political career, Harris hewed to what Democratic interest groups and the political consultants who serve them demanded from her. She inherited the political machine created by her former boyfriend, Willie Brown.

Harris has largely avoided facing substantial competition, and the one time she did in 2020, voters resoundingly rejected her. Despite this rejection, Harris was handed a position as Vice President in what was widely perceived as a strategic move by Biden to put a black woman on the ticket. Holding Harris to low standards reflected Democrats’ soft bigotry and patronizing attitude toward minorities. Because the Party has essentially coddled Harris, she has not been forced to grow as a leader in ways she otherwise might have.

That Harris is now consolidating support as Democrats’ best hope of defeating Trump points to a major legitimacy crisis for the Party, as well as for the media and the federal bureaucracies that are heavily aligned with it.

It was only possible for such an unpopular candidate to gain the Party’s support because, since 2016, Democrats and the mainstream media have gone to extreme lengths to subvert democracy in order to target Trump. These lengths have included the Russia collusion disinformation campaign, mass censorship of political speech, attempts to criminalize political opposition, and an effort to prevent Trump from running for office again.

All these activities have eroded the legitimacy of the state, the media, and the Party. Their legitimacy depends on public confidence. This confidence diminishes when these institutions so transparently undermine civil rights, fail to meet citizens’ needs, and operate without integrity.

The war on democracy led by Democrats, the press, and the “deep state” has, in this way, ultimately helped Trump gain support. At the same time, it has left Democrats without good options to defeat him.

By favoring woke, racialist politics over a substantive political platform and by selecting nominees in an anti-democratic process for three presidential elections in a row, Democrats have been left with an extremely weak candidate. By consistently showing bias for over eight years, the mainstream media has lost prestige and is no longer in a position to shape and manipulate public opinion in favor of Harris. And by weaponizing government against Trump and his supporters, federal agencies have inspired hatred and distrust among many members of the public who may view Harris as the anointed figurehead of this broken deep state bureaucracy.

The Party’s Crisis Of Legitimacy

There are many reasons to be worried for the future of America’s liberal and democratic civilization. There are still a few months remaining before the election, and it is possible that the Democratic Party and the federal government may take further anti-democratic actions before then. Harris has a chance of winning the election, yet no positive vision for the country. Her clearest viewpoints seem to emphasize a dehumanizing view of racial minorities and women as inherently victims of white supremacy and patriarchy.

The reality is that Harris is a poor manager and a poor campaigner. Harris appears to be a tyrannical manager who abuses her staff, which resulted in many high level staff leaving. They describe her as an “inconsistent and at times degrading principal who burns through seasoned staff members who have succeeded in other demanding, high-profile positions.”

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