Kamala Harris and her new sidekick, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have opened their vibes-based campaign with a faux-populist platform. Included in this are plans for a massive expansion of federal power, paying mortgages for homebuyers, raising corporate taxes and fixing grocery prices. It’s an agenda even leading Democratic economists, as well as conservative ones, lambast as impractical.
The right mistakenly paints these ideas as ‘socialist’. ‘Kamunist’ has become their new attack line. Last week, the ever-crazed Donald Trump posted a picture on X depicting her addressing something like a Stalin-era Communist Party congress. These memes may work on Goldwaterites in their eighties, but mean very little to most voters more than three decades after the fall of the USSR.
Harris may be many unpleasant things, but being a serious Stalinist is not one of them. Throughout her career she has been one thing – an ambitious operative of the oligarchs, government bureaucrats and urban warlords who dominate today’s Democratic Party.
As she edges closer to power, Harris has been miraculously resurrected as the ‘only hope’ by leftist media like the Guardian and the Los Angeles Times. Places like the Nation, which claims Harris represents the ‘end of the neoliberal era centrist consensus’, are perhaps even more deluded than Harris’s right-wing critics.
Harris was introduced to the San Francisco elite in the 1990s by her former lover, California’s longtime assembly speaker and former San Francisco mayor. She has never been a grassroots candidate with a strong working-class or minority base. Rather, she is the creation of a cabal of elite capitalists, their media megaphones and a network of nonprofits capable of producing hundreds of millions of dollars for progressive causes.
Harris has enjoyed consistent support from those who inhabit the Hamptons, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. California donors collectively contributed over $500million to her 2016 Senate race. The largest benefactors to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign included employees at Alphabet (the parent of Google), Cisco and Apple, as well as many prominent media and entertainment interests.
Now, as a recent Politico article breathlessly reports, Harris is now the ‘favourite daughter’ of the powerful Bay Area political cabal. Her base lies with Bay Area law firms and tech mavens, such as Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and Sean Parker, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, former Yahoo managing director Marissa Mayer, venture capitalist John Doerr, Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell, and various executives at tech firms like Airbnb, Google and Nest.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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