Reaching the Center

The delirium surrounding the successful launch of her presidential campaign has yet to subside, but it will. And then Vice President Harris will have to tell us what she believes on a wide range of issues she’d rather not talk about. Having been nearly invisible for years, many centrist Democrats and independents imagine her to be as “woke” as anyone on the far left of California politics could hope for (and as nearly everyone else might fear). If not effectively countered, I worry that this perception of the vice president will prove disastrous in November.

Are Elon Musk and other tech billionaires supporting Trump simply because they want lower taxes and fewer regulations? This appears to be common knowledge among Democrats, but it is mostly a hallucination. Their support has much more to do with what Musk frequently derides as “the woke mind virus.” Vice President Harris might not like the phrase, or she may believe that it callously ignores some obvious examples of social injustice, but if Trump wins in November, Democratic entanglement with the far left will be one of the primary reasons why.

The Harris campaign clearly hopes to win on the issues it finds easy to frame—reproductive rights, Trump’s corruption, gun violence, etc.—and by turning out its base, by leveraging the politics of identity. They don’t appear to be thinking about the millions of white, non-evangelical voters who aren’t part of the MAGA cult, and who find any appeal to identity pointlessly divisive. As many have said, to allay the fears of these voters Vice President Harris should produce a “Sister Souljah moment,” drawing a clear line between herself and the far left of the Democratic party. She needs to create distance by actively disagreeing on specific policies and by positively affirming core American values: patriotism, meritocracy, support for freedom of speech, and opposition to authoritarianism in all its forms. Vice President Harris should attack illiberal extremism on both the right and the left.

No doubt the campaign is busy studying polls in swing states and may have reasons to believe that the vice president shouldn’t say anything that could alienate the leftwing of the party. But to appeal to the center, a pivot from progressive orthodoxy is clearly necessary.

Consider this amazing piece of pandering from President Biden in the commencement address he gave at Morehouse college in May: