Kamala Harris Against History

The candidate's "unburdened by what has been" and "coconut tree" lines push her party toward a troubling partisan divide over the past itself.

President Joe Biden is out of the 2024 race, and Vice President Kamala Harris is angling to lead her party’s ticket. In the surge of interest in her revised candidacy this past week, online attention has focused on two of her turns of phrase. One is a line Harris has apparently been repeating for many years, returning to it so often that a four-minute clip of her saying it dozens of times is trending on social media.

That line—a call to envision and work toward “what can be, unburdened by what has been”—has been widely placed in tension with the other phrase in which Harris, quoting her mother, scoffs at those who “think [they] just fell out of a coconut tree.” No, she says, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”

Such a tension would be interesting—if it existed. It’d suggest a thoughtful balancing of progressive and conservative impulses, of aspiration for benevolent advancement and respect for wise tradition, of acknowledgment of the real ills of history alongside a quest for the careful preservation of its goods.

Unfortunately, this supposed tension is not evidenced. The contradiction is not within the vice president’s thinking but across the partisan divide, as Harris looks likely to lead Democrats toward a simplistic condemnation of bygone times while the GOP just as simplistically embraces a nostalgia so rosy it is sometimes false.

Listen to the coconut comment in context, as the line itself suggests we should, and you’ll find Harris isn’t speaking about respect for prior generations or retrieval of the virtues of the past. She’s accounting for the evils and woes of history so as to better progress ...

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