Rich Lowry
Syndicated columnist
We’ve passed the peak of woke politics in the U.S., and the Harris for president campaign was the leading indicator. Of all the things that Kamala Harris wants you to know about her — that she grew up in a middle-class family, that she wasn’t Joe Biden, that she had a “to-do list” for the American people — perhaps foremost among them is that she’s not woke.
She doesn’t have any rote line asserting this, but achieving distance from the fashionable leftwing politics that defined the Trump years and their immediate aftermath motivates much of what she says and does.
That Harris felt compelled to disavow so many of the ideas that she once embraced is a powerful testament to their political toxicity. An idea has won or lost in American politics when both parties favor or oppose it, or simply don’t want to fight over it anymore. Ronald Reagan’s economics truly prevailed when the Democratic Party, via Bill Clinton in the early 1990s, accepted his basic approach. Gay marriage won politically when Republicans decided to stop talking about the issue.
By this standard, woke attitudes and policies are in marked decline, and Kamala Harris is Exhibit A.
Except for her abortion radicalism, she’s turned her back on much of what she once professed to believe or sympathize with.
Defund the police? Absolutely not.
Abolish ICE? No way.
DEI? Haven’t heard of it.
Medicare for All? That was a long time ago.
The Green New Deal? Let’s not get carried away.
She backed off her extravagant positions on the trans issue and the border. She insisted that rather than pushing the envelope on either, she simply wanted to follow the law. You could be forgiven for thinking the only pronouns she knows are she/her and he/him.
Harris didn’t bring up identity politics at all. Not only did she not talk about the once-ubiquitous concepts of white privilege or “equity,” she didn’t even talk about breaking the glass ceiling or the history-making nature of her candidacy. Listening to her campaign, you’d have no idea that the twin “isms” — racism and sexism — have been consuming obsessions of the Left for years now.
There’s also no hint of the hostility toward law enforcement that characterized progressivism with the rise of Black Lives Matter. No, Harris was a Glock-wielding tough-as-nails prosecutor, who, you might have heard, is the only person in the race who has prosecuted transnational gangs.
This is as complete a volte-face as we’ve seen in recent American politics. In French Revolution terms, Harris once was a fellow traveler with Robespierre, the famous radical, but now is happy to go along with the Thermidorian Reaction that toppled him. It’s as if William Jennings Bryan decided, after inveighing against them so famously, that the gold standard and Eastern financial interests weren’t so bad after all.
What happened is that many Democratic politicians believed that the reaction to Trump and the revulsion over the killing of George Floyd had fundamentally reoriented American politics and the hothouse leftism of college campus could be exported to the country at large. In reality, most people were never on board. Joe Biden wouldn’t have won the presidency in 2020 if he’d been woke.
By no means does this suggest that woke priorities are on their way out. They are still dominant in academia and in other elite institutions.
Her sincerity was neither here nor there, though. That a politician who marinated for decades in progressive California and who once espoused or sounded favorable to every single woke priority realizes that she can’t do so and appeal to a majority of Americans spoke volumes. Harris doesn’t have great political instincts, yet even she gets this.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.