Miss Congeniality

Why Are The Democrats Like This? No, Really: I'm Asking

Before we get to the actual Substack, I have a quick announcement: After many, MANY months of work, my feature article on Colonial Williamsburg has dropped at Politico.

If you’re not familiar: Colonial Williamsburg is an outdoor “living history” museum where staff wear 18th century garb and teach people history while portraying people who lived in Virginia’s former capital circa 1776. But which history do they teach? And, in an era where our political factions violently disagree on our founding and its meaning, how do they teach that history without a second revolution breaking out on the Palace Green?

Last year, I travelled to Virginia to find out how Colonial Williamsburg navigates our fraught history. The answer was more complicated than I expected. Please go check it out if you would like to!

Anyway…

Miss Congeniality

Why Are The Democrats Like This? No, Really: I'm Asking

As the giddy, almost religious exuberance of Harris’ unlikely nomination begins to ebb, the political world returns to more mundane concerns, like the platform she plans to campaign on. You can’t find it on her website. Her speeches tend to be short on details, as speeches often are. Our first real chance to get hard answers came yesterday, when CNN’s Dana Bash sat down with Harris and Walz for their first television interview since her unexpected candidacy began six weeks ago.

The hard answers Harris gave are not surprising given her DNC speech, but this does not make them less disappointing. Like Biden, she is attempting to run to the right of Trump on immigration, which is both immoral and stupid. Like Biden, she also apparently plans to continue giving Israelis weapons for war crimes forever, no questions asked. As Tana Geneva put it:

There are so many ways they could have answered to make me an enthusiastic voter, without fatally raining down the wrath of AIPAC.

“Israel has the right to defend itself, but all options are on the table. There’s a difference between defensive, and offensive, weaponry.” Something like this.

Something emotional, that rises to the fact that the news in Gaza is so traumatizing, every woman I know who follows politics cries all the time. “Unlike what J.D. Vance thinks, I have children. So I cry whenever I read about children killed by US bombs.”

They did not do anything remotely close.

Her whole article is great: I won’t try to recap it here. The point is that people have written great stuff on Harris’ bad policy positions, which frees me up to write about the thing that made me the most angry and, to me, captures everything wrong with the Democratic party.

About halfway through the interview, Bash asked Harris if she would appoint a Republican to her cabinet. Here is her response:

Yes, I would…I have spent my career inviting diversity of opinion. I think it's important to have people at the table, when some of the most important decisions are being made, that have different views, different experiences. I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican.

No one, to my knowledge, has ever asked a Republican presidential candidate if they would appoint a Democrat to their cabinet. They do not ask this question because the question is incredibly stupid. Would you, after the country votes for you and your values and your policy positions, grant even a single iota of power to someone who opposes those values and positions? Would you deny one of your own people the opportunity to build their resume?

Apparently, on this side of the aisle, the answer is yes.

I paused my bootleg stream, took a few deep breaths, and asked Twitter if I was having a stroke. Some people understood. Others didn’t see the issue. Diverse opinions are important. Reaching across the aisle is important. It’s a campaign promise, it doesn’t mean she’ll actually do it. Maybe it will convince some undecideds to vote for her. What’s the harm?

1. There is a difference between cooperating with people in power that you disagree with, and giving power to people you disagree with

2. There is a difference between diversity of opinion amongst people who share the same core beliefs, and a group of people with disagree on fundamental points.

3. If you think a “campaign promise” (read: nonbinding, manipulative) can convince any Republican-leaning voter to vote for Harris (or any Democrat for that matter), you are — excuse me — out of your goddamn mind.

Harris wouldn’t pick some Trump fanatic, I get that. She’d pick a Liz Cheney, an Adam Kinzinger: someone relatively sane…but with deeply conservative values. Kinzinger tried to repeal Obamacare and voted to punish sanctuary cities. Liz Cheney is an anti-abortion war hawk. These are not “agree to disagree” positions. These are, I hope, irreconcilable ideological differences.

Do you believe your policy positions are better than Republican positions, or not? Do you believe that your vision for America is the correct path forward, or not? If so, then why would you not fight for the best version of America you can get? Why would you betray your country by accepting anything less if you can possibly help it? No, really, I’m asking. I don’t get it. Why is this considered normal?

It’s culture shock, I guess. I did not grow up in a liberal household. I grew up with Objectivist parents — people who live according to the philosophy of Ayn Rand — and also Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Everyone I knew believed that the only way to save America was to reverse every oppressive piece of Democratic legislation and replace them with their own cherished policies. They all planned to fight as hard as they had to in order to make that happen. The idea of surrendering even a scrap of power to the ideological enemy was truly inconceivable.

They were absolutely correct in this.

I’m not talking about stealing elections. This isn’t about playing dirty, it’s about playing to win. I’m not talking about the ballot box at all. Elections are Olympic trials for politics. Congratulations: you have qualified to play the actual game, which is maneuvering meaningful policy through a system that defaults to gridlock by design. You win when you make this country better — or worse. Democrats won the 2020 election. Republicans won Dobbs v Jackson’s Women’s Health Organization. Tell me: which trophy is worth more?

Politics is a game of hard-fought inches and the act of giving up any advantage, however small, when you don’t absolutely have to, suggests a far deeper problem. You’re not concerned with achieving actual victory, you’re just happy to be here. People of the audience, may I present: Miss Congeniality. She didn’t win anything, but wasn’t she a sweetheart?

Kamala Harris spent the majority of her 27 minutes carefully saying nothing. In what might be an electoral first, she refused to commit to any specific policy for her first day in office. Instead, she gestured vaguely at abstractions like rebuilding the middle class, cultivating joy and unity, bringing down prices, investing in small businesses, strengthening the family, and other, similarly milquetoast platitudes. Credit where credit is due, she did make one specific and good promise: a child tax credit expansion to $6K. She also did not explicitly link herself to Obama’s unkept promise of “hope and change,” which was a good move. She went with “hope and optimism” instead.

The people want and need more than hope and optimism in 2024. We live in terrifying times and the wolves the Dems keep talking about are howling at the door. How will Harris face down these threats if she can’t even commit to what she’ll do on Day One?

In Harris’ defense, she is uncomfortable with interviews. She will never be at her best in this format. But these are questions interviewers ask every candidate, and her answers were clearly prepared; she planned to say these things. There’s a spinelessness here, a cowardice. The kind of eagerness to appease and placate that leads to promises of inviting a Republican into your cabinet.

The only left-of-center political movement that isn’t some flavor of suicidal is unionization. I’ve written about this before and will write about it again: unions are making demands that fall so far outside our Overton Window of politics that people see them as apolitical, to the point that Trump voters are signing on. They are succeeding at what mainstream Dems fail at again and again: they are actually reaching Republican voters, not through empty gestures or compromise, but through real, concrete improvements, measured numerically, promised and delivered.

I am still going to vote for Harris, and I’m still marginally happier about voting for her than I was for Biden. I like her vocal commitment to things like building 3 million housing units, addressing price-gouging, and codifying the right to an abortion, even if the specifics remain vaguer than I’d like. Her immoral border policy and apparent commitment to enabling war crimes in Palestine make me sick, and yet Trump is somehow worse on both issues while also being dramatically worse on literally everything else and a threat to democracy itself. That’s the ultimate dealbreaker on staying home, for me.

I’m disappointed that Harris is following in Biden’s footsteps and making this election a referendum on Trump. Hey, it worked in 2020 and she’s not a billion years old. She’s got a real shot at winning.

But it’s not going to work forever, even if the GOP stays scary, even if it gets worse. Your voters — voters you need to win — are on the brink of rebellion. Your days as Miss Congeniality are numbered; You will either start playing to win or lose the opportunity to play at all. I know which option I’d choose. Do you?