President Kamala Harris is a disaster in the making for America

In reporting the American presidential election, the currently fashionable media consensus is the claim that, with the 74-year-old incumbent President of the United States infected with coronavirus and his opponent, who will be 78 by inauguration day, showing signs of uncertainty concerning whether he has had his lunch, the encounter between the vice-presidential candidates this evening assumes an unprecedented significance.

The old maxim that a vice-president is only a heartbeat away from the Oval Office is being invoked in aid of this claim. One can see the logic of the assertion, but it ignores the reality that, on the Democratic side of the contest, represented by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it is irrelevant. In the event of a victory for the Democrats, Kamala Harris would be president from day one in a political partnership that “sleepy Joe” himself, in his stumble-mumble utterances, has referred to as the “Harris-Biden ticket”. 

Regardless of Biden’s state of health or life expectancy, if American voters are duped by his supposed credentials, the outcome would be a de facto Harris presidency. That reality is based not on Harris’s abilities or any exceptional personality, but on the fact that Biden, along with the rest of the Democratic Party leadership, is in hock to the “woke” faction that has conquered what was formerly one of America’s two great parties of state. Whoever his running mate might have been, the agenda would have been the same. Harris is a symptom, not the pathogen. Any one of her former rivals for the vice-presidential nomination would have pursued the same woke agenda.

They are all clones: ultra-feminist, yet contradictorily in servitude to the “trans” lobby; fiscally incontinent (Biden plans to increase federal spending by $5.4 trillion over the next decade) to a degree that carries the real threat of bankrupting post-Covid America, with domino consequences for the world economy; and determined to defund or neuter the police forces that alone can contain the endemically violent society that is the United States. 

Anyone who wants to understand Kamala Harris need only watch the recordings of the Senate confirmation hearings for Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Harris behaved like an attack dog rather than a responsible legislator. She affirmed her belief in the claims of Christine Blasey Ford, even as they fell apart. “Dr Ford is a profile in courage,” she claimed, despite the fact that the only people who needed courage were those who stood up to the defamatory onslaught of the Democrats and their media cheerleaders.

In an attempt to throw mud, from even the unlikeliest source, at Kavanaugh, she bizarrely chose to question him about the Trump-Russia collusion canard current at the time, though it turned out she had not a shred of evidence to justify this line of questioning. She did, however, contribute something of significance to the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. As the panel moved towards a vote, she lamented: “This should not be tyranny of the majority.”

Yet, curiously, by the following year, this opponent of the tyranny of the majority was canvassing the abolition of the electoral college: “There’s no question that the popular vote has been diminished in terms of making the final decision about who’s the President of the United States and we need to deal with that. So I’m open to the discussion.”

For those who find Senator Harris’s positions inconsistent and illogical, the explanation is straightforward. She is a Democrat. That means that any majority, however constituted, that promotes candidates, legislation or interests endorsed by the Democratic Party is a legitimate majority; any majority that supports Republican or conservative interests is a “tyranny”. 

As the pantomime impeachment process for Donald Trump was being cranked up last year, Harris was still pursuing her vendetta against Justice Kavanaugh: “Brett Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people. He was put on the Court through a sham process and his place on the Court is an insult to the pursuit of truth and justice. He must be impeached.” 

Like many politicians, notably her role model Hillary, Harris endorses the revolutionary movement that has engulfed the Democratic Party, whose public face now is Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Harris has extravagantly embraced BLM, lavishing praise on its founders whose “brilliance” she has proclaimed. Two of those founders are self-described “trained Marxists” and the third is a supporter of Nicolas Maduro, the Marxist dictator of Venezuela. There is no danger of the tyranny of a democratic majority gaining traction there. 

BLM is unashamedly Marxist; that is to say, it seeks to advance a creed that has slaughtered more than a hundred million souls since the Russian Revolution in 1917. Yet no reproach attaches to that connection in Democratic circles. By assuming a name that encapsulates a sentiment with which no decent person can disagree, Black Lives Matter has imposed its revolutionary agenda on Democrats and terrorised much of America with hugely destructive riots. Its primary objective, as proclaimed in its original mission statement, is the abolition of the family.

Last May, in Washington DC, Harris joined a BLM demonstration that only hours before had attacked police and journalists. She has claimed the movement has been the most significant agent for change within the criminal justice system: “Because it has been a counter force to the force within the system that is so grounded in status quo and in its own traditions, many of which have been harmful”. That status quo includes all the benefits, rights and safeguards guaranteed by the American Constitution – scornfully dismissed by Harris in her interrogation of Justice Kavanaugh as “that book you carry”, referring to his pocket edition.

Abolishing the police, as BLM demands, and handing over police powers to citizens’ committees is incompatible with democracy. Harris has also stubbornly refused to commit herself on whether she would support “packing” the Supreme Court by expanding the bench, in order to stuff it with radical justices, as the Democrats intend. That silence provides its own answer. 

It is unlikely that Mike Pence will succeed in extracting answers from Harris on such questions during the debate. In a sense, it hardly matters. If America cannot discern the wholly alien force that the Democratic Party has become and the danger it poses to the nation’s liberties and prosperity, then the election will represent a process of Darwinian natural selection; if the majority fails that test, it will have deserved the consequences.

The Democrats and their far-left allies from the disreputable reaches of identity politics have aggravated racial tensions and set Americans against one another. America’s historical progression from slavery, through Jim Crow, to desegregation was painfully slow; but at least it was moving in one improving direction. 

Today, that progress has been reversed. The identitarian labels that have been imposed – “African-American”, “Latino”, etc. – have a divisive and ghettoising effect. Not long ago, the universal aspiration in the United States was simply to be American.