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A Game of Thrones politician? (Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
For all the firsts that Kamala Harris represents as a presidential candidate, there’s one part of her identity that seems to both inflame her opponents and energise her supporters like none other. If elected, Harris will be not just the first woman of colour to ascend to the presidency; she will be a woman without children of her own.
Harris, 59, has been married for 10 years to attorney Douglas Emhoff, and is stepmother to his two adult children who famously (and, let’s be honest, adorably) refer to her as “Momala”. It’s her first marriage; before that, she had several high-profile relationships with men including television personality Montel Williams and San Francisco politician Willie Brown, who is 30 years Harris’s senior and is credited with helping jump-start her career as a district attorney.
There are various ways to describe Harris’s romantic history and current family background: non-traditional, blended, modern, messy. The youths, possibly, might call it “brat”, a lifestyle vibe characterised by chaotic fun (along with cocaine use and the occasional emotional breakdown). But whatever you want to call it, it’s remarkable to consider how far we’ve come from the days of rigidly defined “family values” in politics, when extramarital affairs could be career-ending scandals, and even just being divorced was vaguely suspicious.
Back then, the platonic ideal of a presidential candidate was comfortingly familiar: a clean-cut, straightlaced, middle-aged man in a business suit, flanked by a pretty-but-not-too-glamorous wife and a couple of school-aged children. The aspiring president whose family didn’t fit within this model faced an uphill battle for legitimacy; the one who was different in some other way could earn America’s trust by adhering to it as closely as possible. It’s surely not a coincidence that Barack Obama, our first black POTUS, was also aesthetically indistinguishable from the average dorky suburban dad on a weeknight sitcom. Compare this to Kamala Harris, whose personal history and political vibe is less Leave It to Beaver, more House of Cards — or maybe Game of Thrones, if you believe that her romantic relationships have been as much about making strategic alliances as genuine affection.
But then, nothing about our current crop of political families is like it used to be — as exemplified by the Republican candidate, who makes the once-scandalously libertine Bill Clinton look like a boy scout. Donald Trump is twice divorced, has five children by three different women, is infamously crude, and recently racked up multiple felony convictions for using campaign funds to buy the silence of the porn star with whom he had an affair while his wife was pregnant. He is the furthest thing possible from the “family-values” types favoured by his party in the pre-Y2K era.
The result is a profoundly confused discourse, in which nobody knows whether to clutch their pearls or let their freak flag fly. The queer polyamorous progressive types who once mocked Pete Buttigieg for not being gay enough are sweating with the cognitive dissonance of remaining sex-positive and fancy-free, while simultaneously condemning Trump for being a disgusting boor with, to quote Joe Biden, “the morals of an alley cat”. Meanwhile, the conservative Right excoriates Harris for being a slutty, baby-murdering, communist diversity hire beloved by childless cat ladies — right before cheering the machismo and sexual prowess of their thrice-married adulterer-in-chief.
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SubscribeThe savvy political move is not to dismiss these people as unelectable or unworthy of participation in democracy; it’s to realise that the childless cat ladies of the world have an unprecedented amount of bandwidth for ambitious, time-consuming activities like, say, running for office
The political dynasties of the future will benefit from the Constitution’s failure to explicitly prohibit cats from running for office.
Don’t be so sure. In today’s political climate, cats, and those who identify as cats could take the matter to the Supreme Court and apply for a constitutional amendment. Anything, however once bizarre, seems possible.
Equal rights for Ailuro-Americans!
And yet Vance’s somewhat tone deaf comment nonetheless captures an important idea. So much of national life, and public morals, is now directed, via their media enablers, by a self-absorbed class of people often, but not necessarily, childless who specialize in denigrating family, culture and nation. Such people really are not fit to lead a country, although they might be eminently equipped to lead a supranational bureaucracy. Theirs is the world of performative achievement, although their achievement brings nothing positive to the world.
This is more akin to what Vance was arguing. It’s not that childless people are unfit for office. Although he suggested there was some selfishness in not having kids, childless people don’t have as big a stake in the future as parents do. Right or wrong, this is the context. The saddest thing for me is this is still a story. Our political discourse has degenerated into analyzing cat woman wisecracks.
I had to have a partial hysterectomy when I was 28. Am I selfish? I taught high school for 30 years, so I care a great deal about children and their futures. I’m a widow who has two cats, so I’m now a miserable woman who apparently rules the country.
Yes, the comment was obviously directed towards only women who had to have hysterectomies due to medical issues. You are, however, a great example of those who take great offense to something when none was intended. The term, obfuscation, comes to mind.
I don’t think Unherd was offended or defensive she was simply sharing her truth. I wonder why you feel the need to continue to attack her?
Vance’s original remarks were guaranteed to offend—just not anyone whose vote he thought he’d need.
Of course offense was intended, and accomplished. The miscalculation was how poorly it would go over with a national audience, putting aside the needless insult and unfunny delivery.
Vance didn’t know he’d be under a national spotlight so soon. Nor did Trump and company know they’d have such a contest on their hands.
What did Vance intend by spurning damage control in order to apologize to cats? Another wooden, hollow attempt at comedy. Ok, the line is a little funny, but his delivery blows and the routine has totally bombed in an altogether self-inflicted way.
I’m surprised your comment hasn’t received more upticks. It apparently, doesn’t fit with those who are happy to judge childless women, and don’t want to know about the many reasons we may not have them.
Dear UnHerd Reader, here is a serious question: Does a lack of children make one more likely to make decisions about the here-and-now rather than for future considerations? Is it possible Vance is correct that childless politicians make decisions which are short-sighted and harmful to future generations?
I’m not her, but my two cents: Many childless women — and men — care deeply about the children of other species as well as our own, and from that vantage point may be more rather than less thoughtful about future considerations. An opposing corollary of your question would be whether having one’s own children creates myopic decision-making that obsessively serves humans to the detriment of other species. (Drill, baby, drill!)
Neither generalization is necessarily valid, nor relevant to holding office. Being a person who takes the long (and broad) look in policy decisions is a question of maturity, wisdom and temperament, not parental status. I doubt the speculation would even have arisen were Harris a childless male candidate.
Well said.
Touche! Well said.
No.
Yes. It does. I am childless by choice and made the observation a few years ago that I would not have voted for Brexit if I didn’t have children and would have voted Brexit if I did. This debate was 100% swayed by the fact that I was childless.
Do you observe a shortage of such decisions made by politicians WITH children?
Well, I wouldn’t vote for a Parliamentary candidate with no children – or one with no experience outside politics. Which effectively disenfranchised me in the election just past.
And who better than this writer to dwell in the valence of wisecracks and lame locutions like “brat”?
UnHerd is 85% Herd.
He was on the money. The same sociological phenomenon is at least partly at work in the woke destruction of universities, and the rampant DEI agenda
Thomas Aquinas makes the case that human behavior can not be understood by a reductive focus, rather it must consider four causal dimensions: material, formal, efficient and final — or matter, form, agent, and end. The media is comfortable with the efficient cause but Aquinas says focus on the final cause: how a person/country moves toward goals. We cannot understand a politician unless we understand the end toward which they’re directed. Creating a world for our children is a more interesting end than winning.
Some time ago the pope remarked that women were selfish if they didn’t have children. I wonder if he thinks the same about nuns.
How many children did Aquinas have?
My three Gen Z teenagers have all used the term ‘cat lady’ to complain about the female teachers that they don’t like — those that they know are childless. They did so long before they ever heard of JD Vance. I now enjoy pointing out to them that they share something in common with Donald Trump’s running mate! In my experience, women with kids are far more likely to make this kind of disparaging comment about childless female colleagues — but only in private. No man I know would ever dare and I certainly would not. Am I in a (very) small minority in making this observation? I searched in vain on-line to find women standing up for JD Vance…. I suspect that the current manufactured ‘outrage’ might be limited to a certain segment of the female population.
I think you might be wrong about that observation.
Demography is destiny, as a famous person once said. Eric Kaufman has drawn attention to religious people tending to actually have children.
In the US the future belongs to the Mormons and the Amish, among others.
Surely this would have a significant impact on future politics. Enjoy the fun and games in the meantime.
And in the U.K. to the Muslims
Same in many other European countries..
Muslims and orthodox jews in urban USA. What will they do when their progeny actually fall into power? Instead of working the system to their benefit with other people’s money, they will be the tax payers. Interesting….
Muslims, evangelicals, Catholics, Mormons, all religions encourage their followers to breed ad infinitum, regardless of whether they can afford it or may not be good parents. It’s to perpetuate the cult not to make the world a better place. Any twit can procreate but it takes skill, money and good mental health to parent well. Forcing women to give birth to children they may not want or are unable to love because they weren’t loved themselves, is to guarantee the continuation of the dysfunctional society as we know it.
“..it takes money to parent well…”
Well, let’s sterilize the poor. Damned deplorable beggars! Who do think they are to assume having children is a human right! Don’t they know the only inviolate right is abortion, the holy right that even old post-menopausal cat women cling to as if it still had anything to do with them.
It seems impossible for Progressives to avoid Strawman Attacks (or should I say Strawwoman, She/Her).
His argument was not directed at one individual. His argument is that people that have their own biological children are as a GENERAL MATTER going to be more concerned and self-reflective about the future. That’s because they have a direct stake. It’s pretty darn close to a self-evident Axiomatic Truth claim.
But of course, Progressives being emotional romantics have to spin the context and make it about themselves instead of addressing whether the claim is actually self-evident.
Just for clarification, am I right to assume that the ‘him’ you’re referring to here is J.D.Vance?
This is it exactly.
Is that true though? Growing up in Britain all the leaders had kids, yet not one put in place policies that would benefit the younger generations. We have a housing crisis because sold all the council houses to themselves cheaply and never rebuilt them, along with not building enough full stop. They knew of the looming pension timebomb but did nothing to fix it, instead kicking the can down the road for the youngsters to fix (while giving themselves generous pension rises thanks to the triple lock). Loads of infrastructure was put on the slate leaving future generations to pay off multiple times the original build costs simply because they didn’t want to pay higher taxes to pay for it themselves.
All in all I see no evidence that politicians with kids are any more forward looking than those without.
I don’t necessarily think it’s true, but Vance does.
Quite right. It’s odd though that we expect politicians to be more forward thinking than anyone else – after all, they have to reapply for their jobs somewhere between 8 and 12 times in their career, which is bound to cause a bit of a short-termist attitude. And the leaders of their parties seem to act on a 24 hour news cycle basis, with no more forward thinking than a herd of cats…
The UK has a Universal Health System. A majority people in the US see that as restricting choice/freedom whereas a majority in the UK see it as a liberating form of freedom. So as a fundamental organizing principle, the US favors choice whereas the UK favors guarantees.
The decision to nationalize Healthcare changes calculations. There is less incentive to account for oneself in the UK because “The Community” of Taxpayers has agreed to pool each others risk so people are simultaneously free to take more risk while also maintaining something of an obligation to the public. Since the Public has a vested interest in an individual’s personal health choice, it creates an increased regulatory environment. With increased regulation and government spending comes a rise in the cost of living along with a reduction in private financial choice.
The US has become more like the UK over time. The US has safety nets and some socialized risk but everyone’s Healthcare decisions are not interconnected like they are in the UK. So in the US there is more of an incentive to organize around the family unit because the “Community” is not always going to bail you out. I think it’s an indisputable fact that nobody is going to love you like your biological family. So it really is symbolic of what kind of society you want to live in. One run by the State or one guided by the individual and family unit.
How do you square your statement that nationalised healthcare raises the cost of living with the fact that cost per capita of healthcare in the USA is massively more than that of the UK (with overall worse outcomes I believe)? Since people pay that greater healthcare cost it must surely mean that it increases the cost of living – or have I got that wrong somehow?
Fair points. I wasn’t necessarily saying the cost of living in UK is proportionally higher due to universal health care, I was only pointing out that any Universal program increases the cost of living because there’s no voluntary opt out.
The US is massive with 4x the population compared to the UK. Of that population, almost 90 million are on Medicare or Medicaid. We’ve agreed to subsidize the elderly, very poor and disabled as part of our social contract so we are being taxed for the Public health care of some and still paying Private health costs for ourselves.
Many Socialists will make the argument that a Universal System would be more cost effective because it wouldn’t need to bracket people into categories and the total health expenditures would be lower than the existing public plus private system. Like the UK, everyone would just be in one Public payment system.
I don’t think that’s the case because we would immediately run into a shortage of doctors. Private sector doctors and specialists in America are paid demonstrably more than say Canada. People also regularly travel to America for specialty doctors. Unless people want their care downgraded, public health expenditures would have to rise dramatically to keep up with demand for both technology and specialists.
We probably do get worse results on average because of the culture. We have more unhealthy people and there is a freedom to be unhealthy.
The hardest thing to do is balance costs and freedom. We already have an excessive dysfunctional bureacracy, I can’t see how universalizing would improve the culture of individual freedom which is the entire basis of America.
Now you say “We [USA] have more unhealthy people and there is a freedom to be unhealthy.”, but in your previous post you said that in the UK people are free to be unhealthy (“people are … free to take more risk”) because they don’t have to pay separately for healthcare. You do seem to be a tad confused.
So 1/4 of the US population have their healthcare paid for by the state, but I have read that c.1/4 have no access to healthcare either by insurance, because they can’t afford it, or from the state.
Just to clear up something else, ‘socialism’ is about ownership of the means of production, not about state provision of healthcare – there are an awful lot of people in the UK who support the NHS who would be shocked to be described as socialists!
I should have qualified it. In the United States, an individual is free to be unhealthy without being considered a burden on others. There’s no obligation on any individuals part to be healthy. In a shared system like the UK, you’re technically free to be unhealthy but your unhealthy decisions affect the collective whole so the government may feel an obligation to ban or limit individual choices that the “Public Health Establishment” deems unhealthy.
The number of uninsured in the US is now fairly low and its by choice. It is a bit unfair that people at a certain income threshold don’t qualify for State services while those below them do. The proud lower middle class have it the hardest. Don’t qualify for subsidies and personal insurance cuts into the food budget.
Americans don’t really have a choice concerning health insurance. We depend on our employers to provide it, and a lot of employers don’t offer it, often small businesses. If you make too much money the government won’t provide insurance—that being Medicaid. Obamacare has made it more affordable, but often it isn’t very good, say, large deductibles. I wish we had universal healthcare like Britain.
How would you assure the system wouldn’t be political?
For example, would Equitable Health Outcomes be a component? Would Climate Consciousness need to be embedded into Holistic patient health plans? Would voting be considered a social Determinant of Health? In other words, should medical counselors discuss the need for mental health patients to vote in order to secure future funding for a specific program?
An interesting point, but bear in mind that state-involved, tax-funded healthcare is the norm in just about every Western nation except the United States.
So, for libertarian better or reduced-longevity worse, the U.S. is an outlier in this respect.
That’s completely unrelated to anything I said
It was an indirect way of saying the UK’s culture has been for a long time been organized by the collective not the family unit. So you’re going to have a more lax view of the US becoming more like the UK in terms of norms and values. This whole conversation is about the utility of shifting norms. A Conservative American and a British Moderate understand logic similar but have completely different value sets.
Exactly.Well said.
Good comment Billy. Most politicians appear self serving these days as they are ‘slaves to the money.’ They only care about their own families, sadly I think this is largely human nature.
A great deal of “extended selfishness” can arise from a narrow concern with the fortunes of one’s kids and grandkids. Posterity is not one or two generations only—we hope and pray.
Not to mention concern about climate change.
People with kids may not be more forward-looking, but they certainly are more in touch with how the education system is working out. And that’s a big factor in how the country will do in the future (and is a large factor in the current problems in the US).
A Democrat cat-lady friend of mine only cares that her social security check arrives on time. That’s it and she’s very clear about that. She has no interest in children or family values at all. And she’s not the only one i know. Perhaps unadvisedly, JD Vance spoke the truth out loud. He got caught.
This. There are some truths that can sting, particularly when they lay the charge of solipsism upon a group of people, and the accusation is difficult to refute.
There’s nothing wrong with not having children. Some people are infertile, but want children desperately. Others know they’d be terrible parents. But still others simply can’t be bothered, or are far more interested in glitzy designer baubles, status, and materialism.
Kamala Harris very much appears to be the latter. Insofar as future generations benefitting from her party’s policies, the progressive model of governance is probably second worst only to communism.
Most of our social dysfunctions can be traced more or less directly to a lack of a good father in a child’s home. Harris’ party epitomizes that sort of neglect – men, being irrelevant in their view, don’t need to do much besides pay taxes or child support.
This of course results in horrific outcomes for many of the poorer and working classes.
My goodness, you make an awful lot of assumptions.
I know a lot of Repug men with dogs who only care that their social security check comes on time.
You really do make some odious comments, don’t you.
This comment was made in response to a male equivalent comment that, apparently, you didn’t deem “odious”.In light of that, I thought mine was rather humorous.
As you probably have noticed, Clare Knight trolls the Comments Section endlessly dropping angry t*rds in the punchbowl without ever adding anything of substance. Must have lots of time on her hands after feeding her cats.
Self-evident? That’s a level of self-certainly that suggests, to me, some emotional investment on your part, T Bone. He could have made the general point without going into hack-comic with bad delivery territory. Yes, some huffy progressives would’ve still taken offense, but not to this extent, especially if he hadn’t doubled down on Megyn Kelly, with that apology to cats (what a fool!). Trump probably liked that one though.
Things that are generally true as a loose rule are not axiomatic truths at all. Once you can rack up numerous exceptions, beginning with George Washington, you should qualify your remarks or keep quiet—once you emerge from the podcast world and blogosphere.
Exactly. My willingness to work hard on community improvements was directly related to being a parent. The reason some areas of gang damaged Oakland do better than others is low-income parents pulling together to create “community schools”. We see this phenomenon in every US city.
I was going to comment on this:
“Compare this to Kamala Harris, whose personal history and political vibe is less Leave It to Beaver, more House of Cards — or maybe Game of Thrones, if you believe that her romantic relationships have been as much about making strategic alliances as genuine affection”.
Until I read this:
“But then, nothing about our current crop of political families is like it used to be — as exemplified by the Republican candidate, who makes the once-scandalously libertine Bill Clinton look like a boy scout. Donald Trump is twice divorced, has five children by three different women, is infamously crude, and recently racked up multiple felony convictions for using campaign funds to buy the silence of the porn star with whom he had an affair while his wife was pregnant. He is the furthest thing possible from the “family-values” types favoured by his party in the pre-Y2K era.”
However reading Mary L Trump’s (sic) ‘Too Much and Never Enough’ I think Kat Rosenfield has produced an absolute gem about American politics in just two short paragraphs.
‘…and recently racked up multiple felony convictions for using campaign funds to buy the silence of the porn star with whom he had an affair while his wife was pregnant.’
That is a plain lie. They were not campaign funds. Or else the FEC would have said so.
Michael Cohen initially used his own funds to make the payment, drawing money from his home equity line of credit and transferring it to a shell company called Essential Consultants LLC, which he had created for this purpose
Trump was not charged with using campaign funds in his trial.
Nor is it a felony to pay hush money payments. An NDA is a legally binding contract.
The only crime was recording the payments made through a lawyer as ‘legal expenses’.
Which is a misdemeanour, and it is not even clear that Trump knew how his bookkeepers were recording the payments, although , of course, he is ultimately responsible for what happens in his companies.
(Trump personally does all the bookkeeping for all his companies, of course)
Interesting though that the Stormy Daniels allegation is just that: an allegation and blackmail. There is no evidence that he had an affair or even a one night stand with Daniels. Just Daniels asserting this for the purposes of blackmail, which the last I heard is actually illegal, compared to what Trump did which was definitely not except in the upside down, Alice Through the Looking Glass land of NYC and its corrupt judicial system.
Those five children are from three women who Trump married. All three. Ivana, Marla Maples, and now Melania. It’s not like he’s some NBA-style baby daddy. Kat knows this. She chose to ignore a rather salient fact.
Good point. And all three wives (until Ivana’s untimely death) continue to support his candidacy and all children and grandchildren get along.
You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
“Trump is a convicted sex offender.”
No, he’s not.
He lost a libel suit against an utterly bonkers columnist who accused him of raping her in broad daylight, in the dressing rooms of one of NYC’s busiest department stores. Trump at the time would’ve been as famous in NYC as he is now.
“Trump is guilty of 38 felonies.”
Apparently so. He signed a legal document 38 times arresting to the value of his real estate properties.
There’s a documentary about Trump that’s currently showing on Netflix that’s worth watching.
Disappointing to see this kind of trivia masquerading as important. Meanwhile Kamala Harris’s lack of skill and experience for the job of president goes unremarked. Sad.
And Trump had a lot of skill and experience?
The whole point of Carlos’s comment is that it’s sad we can’t discuss people’s record, policy prescriptions and suitability for the hardest job in the world, instead of their personal foibles or plain old demographic (as if all single women are one voting block). But this is deliberate on the Left. It’s deliberate when comments continue to snap back to “look how tacky these Repugs pigs are” instead of advancing a defense of Kamala’s record in office compared to Trump’s. It’s just using stereotyping which is so common now that people forget that it’s a circular argument (“Vance is a pig therefore what Vance says about women can’t be nuanced because he is a pig.”) Stereotyping is demeaning and we all hate it when it is done to us.
Yes…. He did.
“If elected, Harris will be not just the first woman of colour to ascend to the presidency; she will be a woman without children of her own”.
Eh?
Did I fall asleep and miss an entire American presidency?
If not, Harris would be the first woman US president, full stop. Of any colour, with or without kids.
Why isn’t Harris President today?
The Democrats are hiding from us why Joe Biden can’t be President for four more years, despite there being nothing medically wrong with him, according to White House doctors.
There is still a coverup in operation.
Didn’t you hear that Joe is FDR 2.0? That’s what they kept telling us but now they don’t like ‘FDR’.?!?
“The inconsistency is symptomatic of the total breakdown of political identitarianism as practised by partisans on both sides.”
Surely the inconsistency is symptomatic of the total breakdown of a broadly shared value system in the US (and the West generally). Said breakdown being largely a function of the progressive march through the institutions.
What says Ann Widdecombe?
Kat should check her sources. It’s not obvious that Usha was ever a registered democrat other than by a clerical error (not on her part). After all she clerked for a series of high profile right of center judges including Kavanagh and Roberts. So perhaps she was never a democrat.
As for Vance’s comment in 2021, taken in context what he said and about whom he said it (Washington DC bureaucrats) was to a large extent correct.
I can’t speak for the U.S but I can already see most of English language MSM in India( in cahoots for the most part with its global Woke counterpart’s) running pro- KH content. Simultaneously it is publishing content about ” sources” saying Usha Vance is being humiliated by MAGA supporters.
I am inclined to disbelieve the latter for being false reportage.
I saw Mrs Vance speak at the RNC on TV and it nowhere looked to me as she doubts his candidacy. But the media is already being used, as fodder for building up KH. UH should do better than feature an obviously dis- informed columnist as Kat R on this theme.
Kat should check if Teen Vogue has openings.
Best comment here.
I remember, years ago, showing my wife our tax return.
Never have I seen such an instant political transformation, faster than a Porsche swapping ends in a turn. This sweet lady went from zero to maga in about 3 seconds.
The fact that Harris is a ludicrous person no one voted for is the issue. Democrats don’t believe in or practice democracy. They ousted their puppet and are installing another.
Who gives two cr*ps about a sarcastic comment? The media, that’s who.
That. Say it louder for the people who are ignoring history or revising, which apparently includes a fair number of contributors here.
The author says that “family is an evolving concept”? That family is an evolving “concept” is clearly a Cultural Marxist idea right out of the Frankfurt School. And as for the childless cat ladies, their “bandwidth” is much less than that of the person who works to support and nurture the typical American family. What life experience does the cat lady bring to the table besides experience in sleeping and back stabbing her way up the political ladder?
I seriously doubt that you have studied the theories of the Frankfurt School.
Marx-Mao-Marcuse is an adequate working summary.
They’re German communists who escaped the Nazi purges, landed at various universities (at Columbia, in the US), and went on to be the founders of modern radical leftism, aka the “progressive” left.
“Liberation” this and “social justice” that, with a very thin veneer of plutocracy to appeal to the very rich. They created the “scholarship” to justify the violence of terror groups like the Weather Underground and the Baader-Meinhof gang, and then a few decades later their modern day equivalents, groups like Antifa and BLM.
Now these activists, along with radical Islamists, receive huge donations from groups like the Ford Foundation, Soros’ Open Society, and other tax avoidance vehicles of the uber-wealthy.
The Frankfurt School laid the first “intellectual” arguments in the west for things like suppressing speech (could allow fascism to spread), heavily regulating private property and the private sector (also racist and supremacist) and for governments that closely resemble the USSR.
Climate activists, Hamas sympathizers, Queer Theorists, Critical Race Theorists, radical feminists, and most other far left groups owe an intellectual debt to the Frankfurt School, for bringing the largely nonsensical works of Marx and other communists/socialists into the western mainstream..
Neither Marx nor Mao was Frankfurt School. Marcuse was, I agree. But he was not central to it,unlike Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. I don’t think Marcuse has been that influential regarding “wokeness”. French thinkers like Foucault, who was not of the Frankfurt School, were far more influential.
Will there be many more hagiographies to this ridiculous woman? Since no one on the staff remembers, here’s a refresher course:
Kamala was soundly rejected by Dem voters in 2020, winning not a single delegateHer approval numbers are worse than Joe’s, no mean feat. She really was the border czar and anyone conscious can see how that turned out. As AG in California, she was mostly known for warehousing black men for petty drug crimes and often using them as near slave labor.
That she is part Indian and part Jamaican does not mitigate any of the facts that relate to performance. Neither does her lack of biological children. Hillary has a child and it did not make her more appealing.
Maybe it did! 🙂
Kamala Harris has not denigrated family. And I wonder what specifics the comment poster might imply?
The author does aptly point out that Trump is a cheater (and an admitted rapist). What greater danger to family than to place moral decay at the helm of an entire nation?
He’s the wrong pick and has been for years. A bully. A hypocrite. A false prophet. Find a real leader. One to uphold your so called family values (which I suspect is really just veiled keep Women barefoot and in the kitchen -speak) then good luck getting them elected in the wake of what Trump has done to the right. He’s gotten the popular populace hungering for political porn because he’s a huckster.
No, Trump is NOT “an admitted rapist.” He’s not even adjudicated as one. His trial involving Jean Harris did not find him liable of rape. Why are you peddling lies?
Semantics – guilty of sexual assault of the kind to which he has publicly admitted. Nice guy eh!
Trump did not use campaign funds to pay off Stormy Daniels. If anything he used funds from his own company.
If anything, Trump’s constant flow of campaign donations are used as a wide open slush fund for whatever purpose he chooses. But his accounting will probably be more careful these days.
So, someone who looks like she does door-to-door enneagrams in Hendon Central will be leader of the free world.
I don’t think Hendon is that bad.
I think the key point about Kamala Harris is that ‘she had several high-profile relationships with men including … San Francisco politician Willie Brown, who is 30 years Harris’s senior and is credited with helping jump-start her career as a district attorney.’ That helps to explain why someone so vacuous has made it to the top of US politics. Newsom at least looks like a movie star.
As Attorney-General of California, Harris stopped prisoners leaving prison on parole so that they could be forced to work as unpaid forest fire fighters (a dangerous job). She can claim legitimately to have used slave labour.
Well said. Kamala Harris is a joke of a candidate. Even the Democrats recognized that up until Joe Biden decided to step down. There was talk of townhalls and mini-primaries to find a worthy candidate. All of that talk is gone now, but the problem isn’t.
Most western societies extend considerable legal and social considerations to women, from divorce laws to norms against violence to exemption from draft registries. By any honest measure, women in industrialized democracies enjoy considerable advantages over men.
These considerations are largely a reflection of the fact that only women birth infants, and it’s almost entirely females who ensure their survival, up until adolescence. Women, then, are more important than men over the long term, as we would quite literally die out without them. Our laws, norms, folkways, and traditions – chivalry, “being a gentleman,” “ladies first,” etc – are all predicated in the very vital roles that only females can provide.
This is also why a single woman who uses her sexuality as well as her gender to advance her career is viewed unfavourably.
“Momala” never bothered with having children, it seems, but shamelessly used both men and feminism to advance herself through an otherwise very undistinguished career.
Motherhood is not an easy role, nor is it always biologically available to all women. But a woman who slept with a much older man for a BMW and a government job is going to be viewed much less favorably than, say, a Supreme Court justice who’s also a mother of 5.
The author, in mucking about in the weeds of progressive identity politics, fails to rise above the trees to remind us of what is important in a presidential candidate – the ability to govern, particularly on the international front. Kamala Harris is unqualified for the office of president, not because of her childless status, or any other personal history, but because she has no experience governing, nor shows any interest in governing.
Were she interested in governing, she would have used these past four years to demonstrate that. Instead she has shown a total lack of interest in her office or any of the opportunities afforded her. When Biden put her in charge of the border, she could have grabbed that bull by the horns and taken charge. She could have placed herself front and center in the border disaster, showing her willingness to tackle one of the country’s thorniest problems. She could have demonstrated leadership by leading from the front. She could have reported her findings and ideas to the people. Instead – nothing; absolutely nothing.
The U.S. faces a great many serious problems, internally and internationally, and we need an intelligent, strategic, committed, experienced heavyweight in the executive office. Kamala Harris doesn’t come close.
Does Trump?
There are others who would be better, imo.
Tell me about the times when an American VP has ever “governed”.
This is what passes for contemporary journalism. It invites the question: is Kat dim, or does she assume the rest of us are? I don’t care if Kamala has or doesn’t have children. I don’t care if she’s given birth to a litter of cocker spaniel puppies. I deem it the apogee of irrelevance what her heritage or sex happens to be, and I especially don’t care if she’s the first of anything. I care what her plans are to fix the border, whether or not she intends to expand Medicare, and whether or not she’s going to continue corrupting the US armed forces with DEI.
Immutable characteristics and flippant statements about cat ladies seem to be as far as the minds of our chattering class can stretch. Outlets like Unherd continue to publish them as long as they submit their blather in academic prose. Quite disappointing.
Ms. Rosenfield,
Be that as it may, I still prefer my chances with Trump than this bloodless coup, this happy putsch, that we’re all witnessing right now.
Many nations have survived clownish leaders (like Berlusconi most recently). Few survive a coup without paying a very steep price.
Does Harris even have a cat? Personally, as a childless cat-lover, I’m uncomfortable being represented by someone who doesn’t check both boxes, and — that being the extent of my identity politics — haven’t yet found sufficient reason to support her.
Thanks, though, for referring to her as a “woman of color,” which ambiguously but accurately reflects her mixed-race, not-white heritage. If only journalists would refer to Obama in a similar manner, as “biracial,” which — however he thinks of himself — is of course the fact: He is not simply “black.” Whether or not one thinks having a white mother (and being largely reared by white grandparents) influenced his ascension to the presidency, accuracy should matter to journalists for its own sake and as a matter of history.
The United States has not had a black president. Whether it elects a second mixed-race president this year remains to be seen.
“The result is a profoundly confused discourse, in which nobody knows whether to clutch their pearls or let their freak flag fly.”
No need to do either. A life spent curating rational thoughtfulness equips a person with the serenity to recognize dissonance around them without being capsized by it. In all times the best thought seldom circulates widely. Only minds without true intellectual ballast thrash about amidst the confusion of competing mimetic trends, awaiting a dominant voice to tell them what to believe, what to think, how to live. The few others of us are happy with our examined lives that we, despite it all, find quite worth living.
What smug knowingness.
Perhaps you’re among the red-pilled cognoscenti, a curator of the Philosopher’s Stone. But online declarations to that effect don’t convince; nor do your often-heavily-biased posts, not noteworthy for independent-mindedness, just intensity*.
Good point otherwise.
*When you speak from experience or with specificity, your voice is less noisy. I’m sure that’s true for most of us.
Yes, those like you with nothing besides flatulent ad hominum to offer make it easy to be smug, and happy as well. Troll away friend.
Man, you essentially declared yourself enlightened–one of the evolved few–as if that is what someone who were such would do.
I’ve not settled in the place you claim to occupy, but I do claim glimpses of something like it. You post a lot of angry rants*, yet claim to dwell in a place of high, calm self-awareness. You contribute significant substance, but sometimes less is more (and yes, that can easily be turned on me, to my disfavor). Rage away–if you still need to on this side of Parnassus, Mt. Sinai, satori, or whatever.
From my perspective, Mr. Out of Nothing, it’s not trolling but a deliberate, warranted challenged to your initial preening post.
*That’s how they often read to me; I can’t see your body language and it’s hard to read tone in typed characters.
Ridiculously imbecilic article together with very flattering photo of Harris. Am I reading main stream media here?
Not remarkable, we have been in a post family era for decades. As a bay area former Dem with a history of community work, I know how useless and problematic Harris is. We have been making fun of her for decades.
I have two dozen cats (in my garden, not my house) and I’m childless. I would sooner trust JD Vance to look after my cats than that self obsessed cackling liar Kamala.
Yes! Cat ladies are the ‘new gays’, unburdened by children and capable of expanding their bandwidth and not really having any stake in the future. A cat lady friend that I’ve known for years could care less about what happens to others or the country as long as her Social Security check is in the mail. She’s a Democrat. A gay couple I know puts their gorgeous Tiffany Chrysanthemum sterling silver flatware in the dishwasher- a no-no – because ‘there’s no one to inherit it’, ie to hell with preserving tradition and beautiful objects. They too are Democrats. ‘Just sayin…BTW Trump did not use ‘campaign funds’ to payoff that stripper; it was paid out of his own account.