Kamala. She’s not Trump. I get it. More importantly, she’s overcome the obvious disadvantages, even in California, of her race and gender, and like President Obama before her, she’s visibly ambitious, with the talent, the intelligence, and the courage to realize those ambitions in a system designed to discriminate against people like her. Also like President Obama she seems to have managed to steer her way through the myriad corruptions set out in our system to trap the ambitious without succumbing to any of them as thoroughly as many of her peers.
Given the limitations of the Presidency, she’ll do. She’s got my vote. What would be nice, though, is if we’d all stop for a moment and look beyond the hagiography and see that we’ve been beating a dead horse politically for decades now with no resolution in sight. Kamala won’t help us with that. She can’t. She owes things to people, and we aren’t those people. We’re the people who can’t survive the decadence, the corruption, the cluelessness about the future that both parties are obliged by their true allegiances to defend, the hostages they’ve all given to fortune to get where they are today. Politics is not a consumer good, it’s a slow motion conflict about who gets to decide how we approach the future. We forget that at our peril.
I’m shamelessly going to meld this by Steve Randy Waldman (@interfluidity) to what you’ve written:
“……If Harris perceives her victories as happening despite us — the Bernie-ites, the Warren-ites, the social democrats — then she will do her best to ignore us while she placates her real constituents.
But if she perceives her victories as happening because of us, then she will work for us and lead our movement.
As part of that, we will have to rely upon our surrogates to work in private on our behalf. Now is not the time to extract promises in public that might be electorally counterproductive. AOC, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren have access to the candidate. Although it goes against the grain of some naive conceptualizations of democracy, real negotiations happen in private. Sometimes the best that we can do is follow the lead of the people in the room whom we trust.” (https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/07/25/we-have-not-been-betrayed/index.html)
I think he’s a bit optimistic – or, maybe, just delusional? I’m not sure what circumstances might cause Harris to believe her victory is because of the plebes who voted (donated, canvassed, phone banked, cajoled) for her. I think it’s baked into the system that the “corruptions” on the margins have the greatest influence in the candidate’s sphere. and, I do think Harris is perfectly capable of, for example, clipping Lina Khan’s wings if Harris’ “real constituents” demand it of her. I have the bad sense that the voters simply cease to exist the moment the election is decided. But, in as much as I hold any elected person in esteem, if Bernie Sanders gives her the thumbs up (which I think he has), then I’m in for the ride, because we really do have no other alternative.
Your final words recall for me a GTA for a microeconomics course I took who said (I paraphrase) economics is the study of what goods are produced, how those goods are produced, and who gets those goods. Maybe politics isn’t a consumer good, but it sometimes feels like “democracy” (writ large) might be.
Addendum. By Matt Stoller.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/billionaire-orders-kamala-harris?r=bwm6
“The only upside here is that Hoffman is being very public, aggressive, and explicit about his demands. And he’s going to corner Harris until she kisses the ring, or refuses to do so. From his perspective, he’s not donating $10 million, he’s making a purchase. Or so he thinks. Now it’s up to Harris to make the choice. Does she have Silicon Valley donors, or Silicon Valley owners?”
I’d like to believe there is an opportunity for Harris’ voters/supporters to counter this kind of move… but it sure didn’t work with Obama.
My comments on this kind of Schweinerei (as usual the Germans have the best words for the dark things) would be unprintable, I’m afraid. I find it interesting, though, that they have no fear now. We need to make them afraid again. Harris, for all her I’m-not-Trumpiness, is not gonna help us with that.
I need to learn to pronounce this word, Schweinerei. Then I need to learn how to spell it! 🙂
I actually do follow interfluidity on Mastodon—at your suggestion, if I remember correctly—and based principally on his posts there, I would judge him to be more of a centrist, more of an optimist, than I have ever been. As an analyst of retail politics in the US today, it’s hard to fault him, but like many liberals (US definition), he seems to me to avoid for the most part the kind of dark reasoning that one finds in Marx, say, or in James Baldwin, or in many others who out of necessity have come to their political analyses in far more perilous circumstances.
We aren’t there yet, and may never be, but the possibility always exists that an excess of optimism can lead us not to a new birth of freedom, but to the fate of Medgar Evers, or Sophie Scholl and her brother. Practically speaking, of course, cynicism isn’t of much political utility, but it does at least help keep a certain amount of bullshit at bay.
Yes; it was me. (Maybe I owe you and apology.) In my experience Waldman is better on some things than others, but your characterization of “centrist” seems pretty much on the mark to me. It was you who “tuned” me into “pessimism of the intellect – optimism of the will” in Glenn’s threads and eon ago. I aspire to a balance that seems continually out of reach.
Na, he’s one of the good guys, and he knows a thing or two. I learn from him, which is more than I can say about a lot of the folks we encounter in the primordial soup of social media these days.