Why Kamala Harris Can Be Insurgent And Incumbent Simultaneously
She really can defeat Donald Trump and Trumpism for all time, but not if she rejects backward-looking accountability like her predecessors did.
It’d be an understatement to suggest Donald Trump and his right-wing loyalists are fuming about this line from Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic national convention.
“Our nation…has a precious, fleeting opportunity to move past the bitterness, cynicism and divisive battles of the past, a chance to chart a new way forward.”
With this and similar turns of phrase, Harris wasn’t just asking voters to imagine a future without Trump’s angry mug screaming in their faces day in day out, year after year. She was casting herself as something like an insurgent seeking to topple an incumbent.
But of course—as conservatives will be fast to remind you—she’s the vice president of the sitting president, hardly a political outsider or member of the opposition party.
“Kamala and her ‘handlers’ are trying to make it sound like I am the Incumbent President, so that they can blame me for the failure of the past four years,” Trump whined on his social media website. “No, it was their failure!”
If the Biden-Harris administration had truly been a “failure,” Trump would be leading, as would just about any GOP candidate. Harris can only deploy this line to any effect for two reasons: First, things are going well. They are not perfect, and surely some Americans, for specific or tribal reasons, are unhappy about things. But there is no mass crisis making people more curious than usual about taking things in a radically different direction. Second, perhaps more importantly, Trump never really left us. And to the extent that he receded a bit after his failed insurrection, his imprint on the Republican Party was such that public life in the U.S. never reverted to a more tolerable place.
Only in policy-absolutist terms, where a political era is defined by a president’s official acts alone, have we not been stuck in the Trump era the whole way through. Nine years running. And what majorities of Americans keep saying, election after election, is that Trump’s America is an unpleasant place to spend time. If Harris’s line is an admission of anything it’s that President Biden was unable to reshape the discourse and political culture unilaterally. Their policies have worked pretty well, but Trump loyalists continue to flood our shared spaces with vitriol and abuse. It’s more than just spin or rhetorical jiujitsu: Harris really is an insurgent candidate running to topple an incumbent—the main progenitor of civic decay in American life. He just happens not to be president anymore.
The line is potent; you can see why Republicans find it so threatening. But the right question isn’t whether it’s credible for her to campaign this way; it’s whether she can deliver on the promise if she wins.
ERAS BOOR
Try to imagine Biden’s presidency if Republicans had moved on from Trump the way they should have after 2020—his name an obscenity, his political style and loyalists banished.