You can’t eat vibes

Say what you will about Kamala Harris, she can read from an autocue with the best of them. The vice-president turned nominee for president gave her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last night and displayed the requisite polish to get through 40 minutes of a tightly scripted speech – with the usual mix of rose-tinted autobiography, wispy platitudes and focus-grouped attack lines – while still appearing to have a pulse. It’s a low bar, but one her somnambulant predecessor, President Joe Biden, was struggling to clear by the end of his candidacy.

It was all there. The folksy, TV-movie retelling of her childhood, born to a Jamaican father and Indian mother, surrounded by relatives and friends and neighbours who seemed only ever to dispense motivational speeches. ‘Never let anyone tell you who you are. You show them who you are’, her late mother, Shyamala, was apparently fond of saying. This is the sort of schmalz only American politicians can pull off without vomiting into a holdall. Pure Hollywood.

The phoniness is baked in, especially with Kamala Harris. Here is a politician who, when she was first running for president in 2019, blasted Joe Biden for his record on race and called his genial relationships with segregationist Southern senators personally ‘hurtful’. She also said in 2019 that she ‘believed’ the women who had accused him of sexual assault. Just over a year later, after her own campaign had flamed out due to dire poll ratings, she gladly accepted his invitation to be his running mate. Last night, she praised Biden to the hilt: ‘Your record is extraordinary, as history will show, and your character is inspiring.’

On policy, her speech offered crumbs, vague intentions – as we expected. Harris’s safety-first campaign so far has made Keir Starmer look like a reckless ideologue by comparison. Perhaps because she doesn’t want to draw too much attention to the fact that she, like Starmer, has flip-flopped on almost every position she’s ever taken. So she kept it simple and (largely) uncontroversial. She promised a ‘middle-class tax cut’, a ceasefire in Gaza (and a secure Israel). She pledged to ‘create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries’ – goals almost no one could disagree with, but she made no real attempt to explain how she would achieve them. More decisively, she pledged to enshrine abortion rights: the Republicans’ electoral kryptonite since the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Virtue-signalling, triangulation, bloodless managerialism – this has ruled over Democratic politics for a long time now. But identitarianism has made matters so much worse. Alongside ushering in a reactionary social agenda, wokeness now requires voters to be ecstatic about woeful candidates – not because of what they stand for, but what their electoral success would ‘represent’. So it was with Hillary Clinton, who Democratic elites believed could ride a wave of ‘lean in’ elite feminism all the way to the White House. And so it is with Kamala Harris. Raise a question about her substance or principles and fanboys will just stare into the middle distance, muttering ‘wouldn’t it be great if we had a black, female president?’. They scoff at conservatives for calling her the ‘DEI candidate’, while arguing for her on precisely those terms. While they have been a tad more restrained this time around, Democratic elites still cannot help but reheat the kind of elitist identity politics that has sent more and more of America’s multiracial working class into the Republican column over the past eight years.

To the extent that Harris’s elevation represents anything, it is the Democratic elite’s ruthless determination to hold on to power. First the machine jettisoned Biden after his humiliating performance on the debate stage with Trump, then it began praising to high heaven a woman who until five minutes ago they all privately said was a political lightweight and a disaster as vice-president. At the same time, the Harris ascendancy seals the party’s long-running shift from being the alleged party of workers and their blue-collar unions to the party of the coastal elites and the white-collar public sector – the ‘party of teachers unions, Big Tech and corporations’, as Ben Domenech neatly puts it. Biden’s ‘union-hall Democrat’ routine wasn’t so much a last gasp as a performative, unconvincing throwback to a Democratic Party that hasn’t existed for a very long time.

Still, Trump remains the great unifier, where Democratic apparatchiks are concerned at least. As has happened throughout this year’s DNC, Harris’s speech was more about the supposedly historic necessity of stopping Trump, who she says wants to ‘pull our country back to the past’, than carving out some bright, brave future. The confected enthusiasm of Harris’s coronation has nothing to do with her and everything to do with a Democratic establishment that hopes it might just about be competitive again, following the final, doddering days of Biden being on the ticket.

I dare say the establishment will sober up once Harris comes into contact with more public and media scrutiny, something she has consciously dodged so far. The write-ups of her speech have been strikingly tepid. ‘It was not a political address for the ages’, begins a report in the Guardian, with some understatement. Harris’s first debate with Trump in September will be her first real test. But it will hardly be straightforward for Trump, either, who has struggled to attack Harris without playing to his worst tendencies – pontificating about whether she has identified as black or Indian and struggling to stick to the economy and immigration policy, where he is strongest.

If Kamala Harris pulls off an unlikely victory in November, it won’t be out of any great enthusiasm for her in the country. Kamalamania is a malady that seems unlikely to spread beyond the laptop class. Meanwhile, working-class Americans, struggling to put food on the table, nursing the suspicion that the liberal elites still hold them and their values in contempt, are turning on the TV to see Dem talking heads babbling on about the ‘joy’ this unimpressive machine politician has brought them. Harris may be blessed with an unpopular opponent. But you can’t eat vibes.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater_