On Saturday, July 13, a day now understandably remembered for other reasons, Bernie Sanders, the senior senator from Vermont and a Democratic Socialist, wrote the lead article in the New York Times op-ed pages making a more cogent case for President Biden’s reelection than any surrogate or commentator this year. If you are a conservative who believes in mostly decentralized government, there was much to disagree with in Sanders’s article. Still, Sanders’s argument for Democrats was policy-based — it did not turn on cataclysmic rhetoric, or identity politicking, or personalized attacks — and it made a clear, direct case for government expansion to help the ordinary citizen.
Sanders’s endorsement did not happen in a vacuum. A week before, he and Biden had co-authored an opinion piece advocating for reducing drug prices, and Sanders’s pro-Biden activism corresponded to sudden support for Biden from Sanders’s allies. Biden himself had begun speaking, for the first and only time in a long insider career, against the “elites” in his own party on behalf of ordinary Americans. It seemed clear that, as Biden searched for support in a party determined to jettison him, he was becoming a Left populist, closer to Franklin Roosevelt in his first re-election campaign (“I welcome their hatred”) than any president since.
This shift also seemed to set up, for a vanishingly brief week, the prospect of a presidential campaign that posed an unusually clear question to the electorate: which would help ordinary people more, the indiscriminately expansive government of Biden or the muscular-but-pared-down government of Trump? The fact that the Democratic Party pushed Biden out and replaced him with Kamala Harris, a much less direct and much more compromised candidate than Biden was in his final weeks, has closed this prospect. It has also given Republicans the opportunity to run their campaign against not just expanded Washington power but the establishment that is promoting it.
Harris embodies this establishment to her fingertips. Unlike Biden, she did not grow up straddling an uneasy and fluctuating line between working and middle class; or attend state college; or complain through gritted teeth, as Biden did to Wilmington friends in the 1970s, that the “river of power” in postwar America flowed through the Ivy Leagues. Instead she was the daughter of immigrant professionals and grew up near Stanford, one of the sites of postwar America’s power concentration. She rose through San Francisco legal power centers and became California’s attorney general. Today she is married to Doug Emhoff, a former corporate lawyer and the ex-husband of a prominent Hollywood producer; her sister Maya, who attended Stanford Law, is married to the chief legal counsel for Uber who served as an associate attorney general in the Obama Administration and is currently helping the Harris campaign when it comes to “polling and running mates.”
private sector labor unions, city parties, and on-the-ground associations which once set the party’s terms. The playbook she has always operated from, beginning with her time in San Francisco benefiting from a federally-funded “war on crime” while strategically embracing progressive priorities, matches the approach of these new ruling institutions: quiet establishment upkeep married to targeted idealism to catch the eye.
This means — as both Jim Cramer, Wall Street’s longtime insider promoter, and powerful financial players have predicted — that Harris will likely roll back Biden’s major claim to opposing institutional insiderism: the antitrust enforcement undertaken by FTC chair Lina Khan and supported by players on the populist Right like Senator Josh Hawley. It also means that, even as she sustains concentrated authority in Washington institutions, she will advertise her progressive bona fides. This will probably manifest itself in regulations, reparations, and voting laws that advertise themselves as benefiting minority communities, with the support of powerful players — Pete Buttigieg, the Soros Family — who have added progressive luster to their names with the cause.
Should Harris fail to take the presidency in November, other rising Democratic leaders will take the same tack, among them governors Newsom, Pritzker, Shapiro, and Whitmer. When it comes to political economy, all these players are comfortable with (or are themselves parts of) the corporate donor class which has defined the Democratic Party since the late 1980s or early 1990s. When it comes to “cultural” or identity issues, they are liberal-progressive. They see politics, as the party’s lead Biden-culler Nancy Pelosi sees it, not as on-the-ground coalition building but as a game of raw numbers — who can eke out 270 electoral votes, then govern in the name of the “people”?
Their longer play, as outlined by longtime strategists like Stanley Greenberg who have set the party’s approach since the 1980s, is in line with this raw number-crunching. Its main tactic is to encourage immigration as well as diversification of gender and sexual identities in pursuit of a new majority of Americans who see Democratic-controlled institutions as their sole patrons in a world of nativism and bigotry. When Harris talks about “not going back,” this is the vision for the future she has in mind — not one based on public opinion nor on associational politics but on the bare-bones logic of a protection racket.
But, as some leftists and keener-eyed establishment conservatives have been saying, the Democratic practice of institutional government, gilded by performative progressivism, has a flaw: it tends to avoid much interaction with the actual beliefs and lives of voters on the ground. And though a few more astute voices in the liberal firmament are urging their colleagues to target their agenda towards ordinary people, the Democrats’ reality is firmly fixed inside the structures of Washington.
This is where President Trump and vice-presidential nominee Vance have an opportunity these next few months, and where the Republican Party has one in the next few years: arguing for policies that both diminish Washington’s power and that immediately benefit ordinary people regardless of identity in tangible ways. For Trump, the policies are direct: letting service workers keep their tips without being taxed; reducing immigration and so reducing workforce competition in low-wage industries. For Vance, they’re longer term and structural: promoting antitrust policies that will break up conglomerates which the past few decades have not only concentrated power in Washington but reduced consumer choice.
This approach matches the rough perceptions not just of working-class voters but of service workers across races and ethnicities. These unenfranchised voters — lower-middle and middle-income; multiracial; mostly young — don’t fit the traditional Republican base (fiscal conservative, religiously traditional). But they do share many conservative views: they distrust national power structures as inherently corrupt; distrust identity categories as irrelevant to their daily lives; favor sweeping institutional reform; and value policies they can see the benefit of in the everyday.
At the Republican convention, their representatives were performers like Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan, and Amber Rose, leading at least one commentator to predict that the “new fusionism” of the Party will be the pop culture rebellion of Hogan joined with the religious anti-statism of Franklin Graham. This fusion — of groups opposed, for different reasons, to institutional corruption and compromise — may be a potent weapon against the insider operators that, by anointing Kamala Harris, the Democrats have settled on being.
Matt Wolfson, an ex-leftist investigative journalist, tweets @Ex__Left and writes at Oppo-research.com.
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