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October 8, 2024 - 7:00am
Last night, Kamala Harris sat down with the CBS programme 60 Minutes as part of a media reboot. After avoiding the national press throughout the past two months, her campaign has recently announced a series of appearances on podcasts and TV shows. However, this interview suggests that, while the media strategy might have changed, the campaign’s internal logic remains the same.
Harris’s 60 minutes interview has a wall-of-vibes dynamic. Policy details were scorned in favour of vague talking points. When asked about how she would pay for her expansive new spending programmes, she pivoted to claims about how the wealthy needed to pay their fair share. In a telling exchange, Harris refused three times to say whether or not it was a mistake for the Biden administration to loosen border controls as much as it did for the first three-and-a-half years in office. Where exactly Harris stood on many policy questions was no clearer by the end of the interview than at the beginning. Instead, viewers were treated to invocations of “consensus” — and a handy reminder that Liz Cheney is a Kamala Harris fan.
In recent years, the electorate has become increasingly polarised along educational lines, with college-educated voters becoming a pillar of the Democratic Party. Recent polling analysis from CNN gives Harris a historic advantage with college-educated Americans, winning this group by 21 points. By way of comparison, Hillary Clinton won this group by 15 points, and Barack Obama won voters with a college degree by only two points in 2012.
Harris’s vibes-based strategy seems optimised to appeal to this group. Many college-educated suburbanites are repelled by Donald Trump’s pugnacious brand of politics, and are also sceptical of the adversarial tone that often accompanies populism of both the Left and the Right. In appearance, Harris seems distinctly non-threatening.
Perhaps her most spirited moment in the 60 Minutes interview came when she claimed that Vladimir Putin “would be sitting in Kyiv right now” if Trump were president. The domestic challenges that weigh on working families — such as inflation, the border crisis, or economic upward mobility — didn’t seem to generate the same passion.
Early on in the campaign, some observers on the Right worried that Harris could try to take the populist fight to Trump. By leaning into bread-and-butter issues such as healthcare and benefits for families, she could outflank Trump from the populist Left. So far, the Vice President has declined that strategy. Instead, she may be hoping to run up the score among the gentry progressive class.
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SubscribeI wish people would wake up and look around. Painting the populist as a fasc!st threat to democracy isn’t unique to Trump or the U.S. They’re doing the same thing in France, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands. They did it in Italy too, until Meloni was elected and the world didn’t end. These populists are not suddenly appearing at the same time by coincidence.
The world didn’t end in Italy because Meloni adopted sensible policies (much to many people’s surprise).
Populism is merely the promotion of popular policies that broadly appeal, and as long as these have a chance of succeeding they are a threat to the sort of “democracy” that incumbent politicians promote which is equally “populist” in its own way involving the deployment of a vast army of regime supporting bureaucrats of various stripes. What is ironic is that the current incumbent political regimes tend to be more fascistic in political form than the insurgent populists. The “fascist threat” is merely a bogeyman to a population that actually doesn’t know what economic policies Mussolini, the creator of fascism, actually promoted, which was a form of state socialistic managed capitalism. Mussolini would have been delighted to have the sort of military industrial complex that would enable him to intervene abroad and try to impose his form of fascism on less developed nations just as the US currently does.
We focus on Kamala vs Trump as the deciding battle but it really doesn’t matter. The enlightenment is over. Rational, empirical-based policy delivering meaningful, measurable progress is gone.
Managerial and leadership positions in the state are reserved for college educated people. And college educated people are swung by “vibes”. An infantile, empty-headed framework for decision-making that can justify anything but conclude nothing.
So, whoever wins the captaincy in November, the ship of state will still be sailed by a crew using “vibes”. And that is why across the West everything is very obviously falling apart.
This is so true. Policy and outcomes no longer matter in the suburbs – only the status game. It was the same with Brexit: nobody knows anything but everyone has an opinion.
You can make an argument that American Vice Presidents are selected for not being a challenge to the authority of the President – so Kamala Harris already comes pre-diminished. It might also explain the selection of Tim Walz as her VP running mate. The puppet’s puppet’s puppet as it were.
J D Vance may be an exception to this observation.
Obama>Biden
Biden>Harris
Harris>Walz
The sane, grown-up citizens have at long last come to understand that the Wokeness goblins that drive them mad were hatched in universities – those finishing schools for the ‘opinion forming classes’. The tragedy of it is that it has taken 30 years for that penny to drop. Our great folly was failing to foresee the long-term consequences of allowing our universities to become colonised by an intelligentsia intent on cleverly unpicking the threads that held Western civilisation together. The irony of it is that the Democratic Party still trades as the voice of the underprivileged whereas the reality is that it has become the voice of a lefty college-sheep-dipped, overprivileged metropolitan middle class. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts
This phenomenon isn’t new. The Fabians pioneered the strategy 100 years ago and Blair and Clinton perfected it. You hijack the party of the left, ditch the levelling-up and replace it with eugenics, identity politics and globalist economics. You and your voters get richer; the poor get poorer and, best of all, you get to feel good about yourself in the process.
People are connecting the dots.