Harris 2024

Based, Coconutpilled, and Unburdened by What Has Been

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“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” (Laughs.) You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

-Kamala Devi Harris, 47th President of the United States (hopefully)

After only three weeks of ever-increasing pressure from politicians, pundits, donors, and inexorable, execrable polling numbers, Biden has finally done the right thing. He has rejected his party’s nomination and endorsed Kamala Harris instead.

I have not been gracious about this decision on social media. To me, Biden’s refusal to step down went from misguided to downright treasonous about a week and a half ago, and my rage has not abated the way it probably should. Very little rage has abated anywhere, generally speaking, for a very long time. Everyone who pays attention to the news is terrified right now, in one direction or another. The GOP has been running off pure, high-octane fear for years now, and the Democrats have built their entire platform around their constituency’s fear of Trump. Fears of authoritarianism or a CCP-backed socialist takeover, or gulags, or deportation camps, and definitely political violence. The total erosion of hope. All the biochemical processes that evolved to help us fight off tigers are pumping chemicals directly into our brains and our bloodstreams but there are no tigers here, only each other.

I happen to think that I fear all the right things, of course, but fear-driven logic always has a tinge of hysteria to it, and the Discourse has been nothing but hysterical for months. Every time I do yoga, which is often but not often enough, and I connect to my breath and my body and try to quiet my brain I am brought face to face with an abyss of panic and despair that I spend most of my time trying to ignore. I know that I am not alone in this.

We are looking for dry land and stable ground. We are looking for a sure thing, and few things have ever been less sure than Kamala Harris. She’s won exactly one (1) national election. Her 2020 presidential bid crashed and burned despite massive hype entering the primaries. As a vice president, she has not done much—has not had the opportunity to do much—and is primarily known for her weird laugh, her word-salad speeches, and her inability to keep staff from quitting en masse. Her record as a prosecutor is, shall we say, mixed. If you’d told me a year ago that I’d be all in on Harris come July, I flat-out would not have believed you. And yet, here I am, in full support of the only Democratic presidential candidate that makes sense.*

Are there better candidates? Yes. Given an open primary we might have ended up with one of them. Thanks to a certain 81-year-old and his coterie of enablers, that did not happen. Months after that ship sailed, Biden’s disastrous debate performance plunged the Democratic party into three weeks of chaotic and vicious infighting without precedent in modern American history at the exact moment the Republicans were coalescing around their own nominee. I do not think the party can handle more chaos. Harris is the quickest, easiest choice. Because she was already on the ticket, she has the quickest, easiest access to Biden’s war chest. She has Biden’s endorsement. Replacing her would be an incredibly heavy lift. She’s our candidate.

But I am not simply resigned to Harris. There are things about her as a candidate that I like. I think she has a real shot at winning this thing if she plays her cards right, and she certainly has a better shot than Biden. Here’s why:

1. Harris is good on abortion

Harris has vocally and tirelessly supported a woman’s right to choose. This is the Democratic party’s winningest issue right now. Voters have opted for abortion rights every single time they have appeared on the ballot: Democrat or Republican, North or South, inside the Bible Belt or outside it. Compare that with Biden, who has a long history of opposing abortion rights. His apparent allergy to even saying the word makes one suspects he changed his tune for political reasons and not moral ones. Infamously, in that horrible debate, Biden answered a question about abortion (his winningest issue) with an anecdote about immigration (his losingest). Harris will never do that. She’s a true supporter.

2. She’s a decent debater

Surely, at this point, we can put to bed the political axiom that debates don’t matter. Harris got high marks in her debate against Pence. She scored major points against Biden during the 2020 primaries when Biden was still good behind a microphone. Also, and I could be very wrong about this, but I think Harris’ weirdness is going to play really well against Trump’s insanity. He is vulnerable to being made to look silly, and I think Harris can do that. Trump, who always comes off as a bully, is going to come off even moreso against a female candidate who isn’t as despised as Hillary Clinton. Because most people (myself included) have spent years thinking of Harris as a word salad candidate, a coherent Harris could knock the socks off voters. Certainly she’ll do better than Biden is capable of doing in 2024.

3. The Republicans have forgotten how to dog whistle

Running as a Black candidate is a heavy lift. Running as a woman candidate is a heavy lift. Running as a Black woman candidate requires some Olympic-level deadlifting—or at least, it would during any other year. She is especially vulnerable given the way she obtained the vice presidential nomination, which happened while the Black Lives Matter protests were in full swing. The Democrats fully subscribe to the more👏Black👏female👏CEOs model of racial justice (as opposed to, like, addressing the systemic issues that lead to racial inequality in this country). Biden was specifically, explicitly looking for a woman of color as a running mate, so he chose Harris. She was, in fact, a diversity hire.

The Republican party of ten years ago could have exploited this vulnerability. Back then, the party was somewhat normal and not completely isolated in their bubble of Newsmax and OAN and social media tailored specifically for them. As a result, they are scaring the proverbial hoes with their mask-off rhetoric. For example, when Brandon Scott won the Baltimore mayorship with more than 70 percent of the vote—emphatically not a diversity hire—a viral tweet termed him the “DEI mayor.” This wasn’t a one-off: “Brandon Scott DEI Mayor” gets a LOT of hits on Google.** It’s clear what “DEI” stands for here, and it’s not an isolated incident.

America has a lot of systemic racism, and a lot of individual racism too. However, the vast majority of people do not want to be seen as racist. They still consider that a bad thing. The more blatantly racist the right is about Harris—and they truly cannot help themselves, it seems—the less her Blackness will hurt her electorally. It will serve to highlight just how extreme core elements of the Republican party have become.

Similarly, the Republican party of 10 years ago could have subtly used Harris’ gender against her: an “emotional” here, a “soft on crime” there. But it’s 2024, and we were already getting T-shirts like this:

Here’s a comment someone casually dropped into my replies, and I recognize that one weirdo isn’t necessarily indicative of an entire strategy, but I would bet my rent money that we’re going to see this all the time, everywhere, for months:

Link

This nonsense will be relegated to Online, mostly, but people like me are going to write articles about it, and offline people are going to read them. With JD Vance’s association with the most unsavory online characters within the far-right movement, it’s only a matter of time before someone in his orbit says something horrific.

4. Harris threaded the needle

These last three weeks were rough for anyone left of center, but Harris had a particularly difficult tightrope to walk. She could not appear eager for Biden to step down; it would have made her appear grasping and unsympathetic. On the other hand, a robust defense of Biden would have associated her with the coterie of assholes who worked to hide the President’s frailties from public view. She somehow avoided both. I do not know how she did it. I don’t think most people could have done it, myself included. She came out of this unscathed, which suggests she’s learned a thing or two about political acumen in the last four years. It gives me hope.

5. She seems fun to hang out with

This doesn’t matter for what kind of president she’ll make but it matters a lot for electability: I would love to drink a beer with Kamala Harris. Who wouldn’t? Sometimes her weirdness is a huge turn-off but sometimes it is downright adorable, as when she imitated Senator Michael Bennett’s deep voice in January of 2023. I will grant you that for a large subset of people Trump would probably also be fun to drink with (or snort Adderall with or whatever; I know he doesn’t drink). However, only fans and sickos like me feel this way. Given the choice, I think most people would prefer Kamala.

6. The Republicans were already mad about the border

One of Harris’ biggest vulnerabilities comes from the Biden administration’s cruelty. Rather than give her a portfolio that would have allowed her to develop as a politician, they gave her the border: an intractable and thorny issue no one seems able to solve. Then, rather than push back against Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against immigration, the administration chose to lean in and move right. This is a problem. I don’t want to minimize what a problem this is for Harris’ electability.

Harris is especially vulnerable to attacks regarding the border, but so was Biden—after all, he was the President; the proverbial buck was supposed to stop there. Additionally, Harris has the opportunity to push back on the entire logic behind Trumpian fears of immigration in a way Biden refused to do. There’s a road out, if she’ll take it. We’ll see.

7. Her politics could be worse

Everything above has been about electability. I haven’t really touched on her politics, because I believe Trump will end democracy as we know it if he wins in November, and I’m going to vote for her regardless. If you don’t feel that way, that’s fine, but it’s how I feel, and it’s how I’m voting.

As mentioned above, Harris has a mixed-verging-on-bad record as a California prosecutor and attorney general. I’m against mass incarceration, I’m for overhauling the entire justice system, and I want to replace the police with an institution that actually protects and serves the people, so I don’t like this part of her history. Also, though, she’s supported bills expanding job training and early release and supported budget cuts to the LAPD. She’s not the best, but she’s not the worst.

I don’t like Harris’ aggressive stance on gun control (I’m for background checks and training, but also support 2A rights). She’s not great on drugs either. But she’s shockingly good on other things. She supports Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All initiative. She’s open to scrapping ICE and creating a whole new agency to deal with border issues (YES PLEASE). Unlike Biden, she opposed the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership, which will help her with union rank-and-file. She’s good on climate change issues. Harris supported gay marriage in two-thousand-and-goddamn-four which makes her cutting-edge on that issue. As attorney general she worked to eliminate the “trans panic” defense and, though she opposed gender-affirming care for trans people in the prison system early in her career, she has spent the last four years speaking out against bans on gender-affirming care for people under 18.

Harris is probably not going to be much better on Gaza than Biden. She will be orders of magnitude better than Trump. If that’s a deal breaker for you, I get it, but if things get worse over there I will go full end-of-life Nietzsche and I choose harm reduction.

What I’m saying is: you could do a lot worse.

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A lot of people have made fun of Harris for her poorly-phrased catchphrase, which she repeats often: “I can imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.” And yet, there’s something very beautiful about this sentiment. We didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree: we did not ask for the weight of history to descend upon our shoulders, and yet here we are. My country’s legacy has great darkness within it. And yet there is something so beautiful about the American dream, which is just as much a part of who we are as the other stuff. I wrote about this on the Fourth of July: the potential this country has to be truly great and, more importantly, to be good. Harris is getting at something similar here, I think. I’m a believer in concrete policy, but I want big ideas too, and I like this one. It’s hopeful in a way that few politicians can manage, these days.*

I don’t know if Harris can win. We haven’t seen her hit the campaign trail. There’s plenty of time for her to mess this up. But I think she’s got a real chance. For the first time in months, I’m looking forward to this election.

*I respect Marianne Williamson and her ideas a great deal, but I do not think she is a realistic choice at this juncture for all the reasons I list in the article. It’s not fair, but life is like that sometimes.

**The original version of this article mistakenly said Brandon Johnson of Chicago, probably because I was super excited when he won and he’s the Brandon of my political heart. The author regrets this error