A positive case for Kamala Harris

The course-correction America needs

There’s not really a whole post in this, but I really want to say that if you are thinking of making any more campaign contributions this cycle my current number one recommendation for best last-minute donation is Dan Osborn’s independent senate campaign in Nebraska — this is a winnable race and if he wins it could be a real watershed moment for reviving a kind of sensible center politics.

I’ve spent the past week being extremely annoyed at the Tech Right’s Donald Trump boosterism.

And in thinking about what exactly they’re getting so badly wrong, I keep coming back to this two-year-old tweet from Elon Musk, confidently forecasting that there would be no investigation of Sam Bankman-Fried because he was a major Democratic Party donor. Not only is it poor epistemic practice of Musk (and the many other tech rightists who co-signed this prediction) to have never revisited the point, but I think it speaks to the core of what they’re getting wrong about the 2024 election.

Joe Biden doesn’t get a lot of credit for the baseline level of integrity with which he runs his government, because Americans rightly expect the President of the United States to govern in accordance with the rule of law. The Biden Justice Department has indicted two Democratic Party members of Congress, they have indicted New York City Mayor Eric Adams, they are prosecuting Biden’s son, and Sam Bankman-Fried is in prison. The thing about Musk’s tweet is that absolutely everybody knows that Donald Trump would do the thing Musk is accusing Biden of and abandon the rule of law in favor of pure friends-and-enemies politics. Whenever you raise this point with smart, politically savvy conservatives, they can sometimes come up with some examples of what they see as Biden-era abuses of power. But the tweet here tells. Cynical right-wingers’ mental model of Joe Biden’s administration was (and is) just plain wrong, and he does a far better job than they would like to admit of upholding the basic integrity of American institutions.

Trump, by contrast, is a clear and present danger to the integrity of those institutions, which is why people who want to talk themselves into voting for him end up making stuff up about Biden to rationalize it.

Because the fact of the matter is that tax rates will go up and down, regulations will get stricter and laxer, programs will get more and less generous no matter who wins in November. One election follows another, and things just keep happening. Those policy arguments are important, but over the long run, they pale in significance to the basic rule of law. It’s a cornerstone of American prosperity, and Trump endangers it in a way that no other candidate in my lifetime has.

I get that less-educated people, people with lower levels of social capital, and people who feel like they’re outsiders who’ve been screwed by the system are less invested in this point than I am or than I think they ought to be.

But successful investors and entrepreneurs have no excuse for ignoring the extent to which integrity and the rule of law provide the necessary backstop for everything good that comes out of a capitalist economy. Which is why they created this delusion about Biden and refuse to revisit or correct it. And if you dwell too hard on the fact that they’re gambling with a 5-10 percent chance of permanently derailing the foundations of American success, they pivot to complaining that it’s “deranged” to worry about this.

So, let’s talk about Kamala Harris!

Because after eight tumultuous years, Harris is the right person for the job, the candidate who’ll turn the temperature down in American politics and let everyone get back to living their lives.

A declaration of independence

I get why the media wants Kamala Harris to issue sharp criticisms of Joe Biden in her interviews. I even, to an extent, think she should do it. But I also acknowledge that those of us in the media have an inherent conflict of interest. I think every single person I know who works for the federal government should be leaking to me, constantly, about their complaints with their bosses and their coworkers, because I am a curious person who likes to be in a position to write interesting articles. But if I think about it objectively, it’s not actually true that constantly leaking about internal disagreements is a good way for public officials to behave. And by the same token, Harris generating drama by talking shit about Biden administration processes might not be a good idea for her campaign.

Besides, it seems to me that she actually has articulated how she would do things differently.

She talks a lot about building a more ideologically diverse cabinet that includes Republicans and people from the business world. She’s actively campaigning with Liz Cheney and Mark Cuban. Which is to say, she’s clear that she wants to revisit the terms of the Biden coalition government and construct something more like a big-tent coalition of anti-Trump forces. Which in turn means that she is offering to break free of the scourge of intellectual capture by “the groups” that have hobbled Democratic Party decision-making in recent years.

I think you actually see this in the bit of daylight that emerged between her and the White House early in Biden’s term. I warned in March 2021 that Biden wasn’t thinking clearly about the asylum situation. His administration didn’t want a ton of asylum-seekers to show up at the border, but was also unwilling to actually say that or align their policies clearly with the goal of preventing it. The person who was willing to say it was Kamala Harris, who got saddled with the quasi-impossible task of ending the root causes of migration via diplomatic engagement with Central America, but who managed to fly to Guatemala and actually say the thing — “do not come” — that should have been the administration’s top to bottom message.

The Groups and media leftists yelled at her, the Biden administration didn’t back her up, and now, three years later, her biggest political vulnerability is still her association with Biden’s efforts to appease the Groups. The good news on the substance of immigration policy is that Biden eventually changed course, and now crossings are lower than they were at the end of Trump’s term.

Harris has also clearly said that she wants to sign the border security bill that Trump quashed for his own personal political game. Immigration groups originally revolted, not so much at the substance of the bill (which is good!) but at the idea of doing anything on border security detached from a path to citizenship for the long-resident undocumented. Biden belatedly shifted Democrats off this bit of Groups-think by linking the border security measures to aid for Ukraine. But Harris is now advocating for border security in a freestanding way.

I personally would love to see comprehensive immigration reform, but it’s clear that the construct ran aground some time ago. And Harris has been steering, from the get-go, toward a more sensible approach that involves considering individual immigration policy changes on the merits. Back in 2019, she co-sponsored a skilled migration bill with Mike Lee at a time when the idea of doing this detached from comprehensive reform was anathema to The Groups.

Continuity with change

You see this same approach in Harris’ affirmative policy agenda, which doesn’t abandon the idea of progressive policymaking, but does dramatically narrow its scope.

A Harris administration, with its bipartisan business-friendly cabinet, is going to try to handle the coming tax expiration pileup in a way that raises taxes on the rich, maintains the health insurance status quo, and increases the Child Tax Credit. She wants to secure abortion rights. And she doesn’t want to reverse the Biden administration’s achievements on climate. Those are all perfectly good reasons for people with progressive values to support her.

But it also means that she has dropped the “transformative” aspirations that Biden espoused.

The whole Biden story in this regard is kind of weird. He ran and won in the Democratic primary as an essentially restorationist figure who would bring back normalcy. Then in the throes of the Covid-19 pandemic, he developed grandiose aspirations for an “FDR-sized Presidency.” If you think about that moment in time — and any politician’s natural desire to be a big deal — you can understand how Biden got to that point. But it was a misread of the situation. Harris and her team see the current situation very clearly and are back to where Biden wisely started out.

She’s articulating housing supply as a top-tier national problem, which it is. And she’s done this even though it’s not a particularly “progressive” issue. It’s just true that it’s a big problem, so she’s going to try to address it. Her headline proposal in this regard is a tax subsidy that could do some good, but I think the most important thing is that she keeps saying she wants to be pragmatic and business-friendly in her approach. The biggest criticism of the YIMBY movement that I take seriously is that it’s too many academic economists and Extremely Online Amateurs reasoning from first principles rather than engaging with the people who actually build homes in terms of the specific barriers they face. The origins of that are YIMBYs engaging in tactical political battles with insane urban leftists and feeling defensive about being “shills” for developers. But Harris has the correct second-order approach to this, which is that you need to talk to the industry players and try to do stuff that’s helpful to them.

This narrowing of focus and willingness to work with industry is a meaningful change from Biden’s approach.

At the same time, Harris is — in a good way — offering continuity with the existing administration. The American economy is doing dramatically better than any other developed country, which is exactly the kind of thing conservatives would appreciate in any context other than an election year.

That’s not to say that everything is perfect. But it is to say that we should look skeptically on Trumpist claims that we need to dramatically shake things up with across-the-board tariffs and mass deportation.

Similarly, the murder rate, which soared in Trump’s final year in office, fell in 2023 and fell again in 2024. I think it’s probably true that we’re still wrestling with problems of low-level disorder that are worse than they were pre-2020, but this is a question of tackling problems in order. It would be unreasonable for police departments to be heavily focused on CVS shoplifters while the murder rate was soaring. But the fact that the murder is now plummeting frees up resources to tackle other problems. And again, this is the trajectory under a Democratic administration.

Harris has always had a sound understanding of crime and policing. She has completely sensible views in this regard and will keep making progress, while Trump actually advocates for police brutality, which risks needlessly destabilizing a situation that is on the right track.

There’s nothing wrong with normal

I want to return to Sacks’s observation that anti-MAGA people tend to talk more about Trump’s flaws than about Harris’s virtues.

The reason for this, which I think is obvious, is that the gap between Trump and a replacement-level Republican Party politician is much larger than the gap between Harris and a replacement-level Democrat.

What’s crazy is for Sacks to think that this contrast favors Trump!

Almost everything that sane people like about Trump could be delivered by Mike DeWine or Mike Crapo or Mike Rounds or Mike Pence or even by someone not named Mike. Trump stands out from the pack almost exclusively in bad ways: he’s very old, he’s a very disorganized thinker, he’s very corrupt, he’s very dishonest, he genuflects to foreign dictators, and he’s promising to pardon January 6 rioters. If Republicans had turned the page on Trump this cycle, they’d be in dramatically better shape in the current election. If he loses, I’m not sure how they’ll respond, but they at least might ditch Trump and we will all — including Republicans! — be better off as a result.

It’s hard to think of as many things to say about Harris, because she really is quite similar to most other statewide elected Democrats. I don’t think she has a strikingly different worldview or approach from John Carney or Ned Lamont or Janet Mills or Tim Walz.

But while that’s a challenge, editorially, it’s also a perfectly reasonable positive case on the merits. There are just tons of sensible, center-left Democratic Party politicians who implement modest, non-transformative levels of progressive change with minimal drama.

The main substantive reservation I have about replacement-rate Democratic Party policymaking relates to housing scarcity, and Harris (like most smart Dems) gets that this is a problem and wants to fix it.

She’ll preserve people’s health care, defend a woman’s right to choose, defend the rule of law, and try to increase financial support to parents with kids to reduce child poverty. These are good ideas! They are not incredibly distinctive because she’s a sensible person. But she recognizes the need for a course correction from Biden’s “transformational” aspirations toward the idea of a return to normalcy. She’s younger and has a more forceful personality than Biden, and her identity gives her greater authority to push back against bullying from inside the coalition. She has correctly identified the main actual problem in the American economy, and if she wins, we get a chance to put out politics back on track.

I sincerely understand why people with very right-wing policy views might decide they want to overlook Trump’s well-known flaws and roll the dice on the possibility that he does something catastrophic. But if you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress.