Watching Kamala Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, I had an unexpected sense of time warp. Speaking of her plans for “the greatest nation on earth” in a navy-blue suit with floppy bow, Harris could almost have been a candidate from my childhood. It would have been thrilling then to have a female presidential candidate (or maybe I would have taken it for granted). It’s gratifying now, too, but the satisfactions are overshadowed by the other part of the time warp: the tedium of policy laundry lists, slightly stilted personal stories, vows to “move past” divisions. She has clearly been tacking to the center, as a candidate addressing a national audience is supposed to do in order to win. But should the center always be imagined as an anodyne, sunny place? What I mean is—are we sure this is really the way to win?
Having grown up in the 1980s and 1990s in the Philadelphia suburbs, the bloodlands over which Democrats and Republicans have waged some of their fiercest campaigns, I feel well positioned to note that the Democratic Party’s conception of a moderate voter seems barely to have changed from the days when I emerged into political sentience. It’s a tangle of questionable premises that conflate policy preference, favored political style, and personal temperament:
1) Moderates are incrementalists who support modest adjustments in policy over sweeping root-and-branch restructuring projects. (Likely true.)
2) Moderates identify with business leaders and entrepreneurs and are therefore difficult to mobilize around regulatory and social safety net issues. (Possibly but not necessarily true.)
3) Moderates will respond only to mild rhetoric and uplifting platitudes. (False! False!)
It may seem like a strange time to call for more enmity in political rhetoric, but what I have in mind is not Republican-bashing or Trump-bashing. What I wish is that Democrats would stop thinking of moderates as finicky neurotics with a lot of aversions and imagine them instead as people of frustrated ideals and ready indignation, people whose patriotic feeling is offended by creeping plutocracy even if they are not its immediate victims, people whose gall can be tapped for a positive national purpose.
In order to do so, Democrats would have to have the courage to identify an adversary beyond Trump and the current election cycle. They would have to put forward a vision that aligns moderates as well as progressives on the same side of a struggle. As long as they respond to Republicans’ brutal divisiveness by disavowing aggression altogether, they will seem shifty and insincere. They have to redraw the lines of division from immigrant vs. native-born, or Black vs. white, or “real Americans” vs. the cultural elite to: the American public vs. unchecked corporate power.
Bernie Sanders proved that corporate greed is a resonant, galvanizing concern. But the Democratic takeaway seems to have been: continue giving bland speeches to avoid alienating the suburbs while letting Lina Khan do her work quietly under the cover of night. I submit that the suburbs have long since been ready to fight corporate overreach—not merely as one item on a list of national challenges but as a principal antagonist whose fingerprints are all over the rest of the list: our delay in facing the climate crisis, the wild proliferation of guns, runaway inequality, the opioid crisis, medical debt, offshored jobs. Moderates too want to feel like part of a shared national endeavor, even if their favored metaphors for collectivity are not the commons or the commune but the neighborhood and the civic body.
Harris is actually well suited—presumably better suited than a democratic socialist—to muster the moderates, if she will only dare to make a forceful case. Moderates love a courtroom drama. In the context of a courtroom, Americans who have no taste for the barricades thrill to hear themselves referred to as “the people.” Enter the prosecutor who charged her cases in their name. Let’s listen one more time to her knockout punch in the debate with Trump. Appreciate the way she holds us in suspense until the last clause:
And when you then talk in this way, in a presidential debate, and deny what over and over again are court cases you have lost, because you did in fact lose that election, it leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have, in the candidate to my right, the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact.
[Now imagine another round in which, having trounced the demagogue who betrayed the people’s trust, the prosecutor strikes at the very root of our American problem, at the antisocial, sociopathic behavior of corporations that have tamped down competition, depressed wages, exploited consumers, harmed medical patients, lied about global warming, written their own legislation, redistributed the nation’s wealth to the upper classes, and with their winnings treated themselves to the souls of a few Supreme Court justices.]
That’s deeply troubling, and the American people deserve better.
You said it, Kamala!
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