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. Spiked.
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