November 3, 2024 - 1:00pm

The Wall Street Journal editorial board recently said Kamala Harris’s election would lead to a “fourth Obama term”. Far from representing some “new way forward,” Harris’s victory would represent the continued reign of the longstanding Democratic power-brokers: “we have been searching in vain for signs that she would break from, or even temper, the progressive excess that defines the current Democratic Party.”

To some extent, Harris’s campaign could be seen as an extension of the project of “boardroom liberalism,” to use a term coined by Noam Scheiber in an influential 2014 New Republic piece. Scheiber observed that the Democratic Party under Barack Obama had become defined by a fusion of corporate machinery and social justice activism. Obama’s “boardroom liberalism” was “steeped in social progressivism, in the values of tolerance and diversity,” and asserted the importance of government regulation of the economy. However, it also presumed “a dominant role for large institutions like corporations and a wisdom on the part of elites. It believes that the world works best when these elites use their power magnanimously, not when they’re forced to share it.”

Boardroom liberalism would mean that elites from Silicon Valley and Wall Street would partner with a progressive clergy to enact sweeping “progressive” change. While in the Oval Office, Obama cultivated relationships with the titans of the digital economy, and large American corporations have increasingly adopted progressive social values as their guiding dogmas (as the rise of the ESG mode of corporate strategy shows). One of the reasons why Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter proved so controversial is because it meant the platform would no longer be a cog in that coordinated managerial-progressive apparatus.

Perhaps the epicentre of this “boardroom liberalism” approach to politics has been California, where the Democratic Party is the tribune of the consolidated elite. In her presidential bid, Kamala Harris has been the quintessential Golden State progressive and has continually ratified the existing Democratic power-elite. Echoing Obama and Joe Biden, she has endorsed the nuclear option on the Senate filibuster. She ran to the far Left on identity issues in the 2020 Democratic primary, and, while her campaign has sometimes distanced her from those positions, it also insists that her “values” have been consistent.

Harris has backed away from some of Biden’s populist themes. The current President has a more blue-collar affect, and his presidency broke to some extent from the Obama years by taking a more aggressive approach to antitrust policy. However, it appears likely that Harris will take a more corporate-friendly approach. For example, her brother-in-law, Tony West, sits in her inner circle and has worked as a top legal advisor for Uber. Then there is Lina Khan, the Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, who is celebrated by many economic populists on the Left (and on the Right) for her regulatory interventions at the FTC. But Khan could very well be ejected from her position under a Harris presidency as part of the Vice President’s push to appeal to Big Tech donors in Silicon Valley. And lastly, while Biden has extended many of Trump’s tariffs on China, one of Harris’s most consistent economic messages on the stump has been that the former President’s proposed tariffs would amount to a “national sales tax”.

Many voices on the Left have warned Harris that she ignores economic populism at her political peril. In its closing days, her campaign has not brought that economic message into sharp focus — instead returning to the anti-Trump invective that has grown so familiar since 2015. The polls remain close, and Harris could win on Tuesday. But the past can be a prologue to future discontent. The very spectre of coordination at the commanding heights proved a crucial precondition for the populism that has roiled American and global politics over the past decade. Doubling down on rule by the managerial elite could invite an even stormier reckoning.


Fred Bauer is a writer from New England.

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