Kamala Harris, The Democrats’ Non-Candidate

It would be invidious — and probably impossible — to highlight one moment of madness from a Democratic National Convention otherwise replete with mad moments. For keen observers of the creepy and the curious the convention was a particularly target-rich environment.

Consider a Presidential candidate untested by the rigors of a primary process, a popular vote, or any serious interrogation by the media;  a Vice-Presidential candidate inexplicably promoted from local irritant to national irritant; a black billionaire talk show host hectoring white working-class Americans about her struggles with income inequality; Biden literally live-action roleplaying the Old Man Shouts At Cloud meme; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the political equivalent of tinnitus.

And no mention of course of the grisly Shakespearean crime at the very heart of Harris’ investiture: Trump survived an assassination attempt, Biden didn’t.

The spectacle was at once surreal and vexing, like an installation by Yoko Ono or one of those crumbling old buildings the Bulgarian artist Christo used to wrap in brightly-colored tissue paper. No one understands what it means, but no one is supposed to. They’re only supposed to feel.

We live in an era of attention spans so bludgeoned by a daily blitzkrieg of hashtags and ten-second TikToks that the narrative as deployed by the Democrats is now almost by necessity only one word long. Witness the abbreviation of their entire campaign thus far to just two words, “Weird” and “Joy,” which bounce around the ether like demented counterpoints, the latter in particular eerily redolent of feelgood totalitarian voodoo.

“Joy”: There’s something inherently contradictory in the word itself when issued as a command, like the cry of a millenarian suicide cult, or the brand name of a wonder pill in an Aldous Huxley dystopia. And no doubt it is joyful, up there on Planet Harris/Walz, much like Stalin’s speeches to the annual party congress were joyful, not least because the first person to stop clapping would be shot.

Still, we should count our blessings. The less these people say the better. One word is certainly easier and less agonizing to bear than the eight-word multi-car pile-up of “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — a statement of near-Gnostic impenetrability which a tame media tragically mistook for profundity on Harris’s part.

Perhaps the idea is to get Harris/Walz to say less and less as the campaign goes on, to the point where words, even one word, will become superfluous, until the charade, being a charade, is conducted solely via fake gestures, fake smiles, fake laughs, fake sincerities, fake lives. We might say: There is no such thing as Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris is an algorithm, a symbol, a cipher, a sequence of crunched numbers, a color, a gender, a mood.

Her handlers can breathe easy in a way they never could with Biden; there is no danger of Harris going off-script, because the script is all there is.

This is a campaign running entirely on vibes, feels, and endlessly replicating buzzwords. And with a media-cultural complex effectively acting as Harris’s PR agent, handling her like a Ming vase being carried in slow-motion delicacy across a wet floor, she may yet pull it off.

The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. We can and should revise this to say that the unexamined candidate is not worth voting for, but people will still vote for Harris, and in their tens of millions. Tellingly, Harris’s selling points are generalities, saying nothing about the individual.

She is black (sort of), a woman, commands the unswerving loyalty of the legacy media, and is evangelically pro-abortion, an issue which is now essentially the American left’s Eucharist. The lack of any clearly-articulated policy positions from Harris — aside from a martyr’s frown whenever Gaza is mentioned — and the corresponding absence of any grown-up discussion of policy on her campaign website is often remarked upon.

But would anyone bother to read her policies even if they were there?  Too many commentators still reflexively suppose that we’re still in the 1980s, with an 80 percent white America and a media which, although liberal by instinct, maintains a pretense of editorial standards.

Fact is, demographic and cultural change means that there are vast sections of the electorate who no longer care about America’s role in the world. That is to say, America as the guarantor of Western civilization — so long as the borders remain open, the welfare checks land on the doormat, the abortion clinics incinerate the embryos, and the alphabet people are validated by appropriate toilet signage.

And the increasingly small micro-faction of voters still smart enough to care are at the same time too smart to believe that anyone, even Trump, can fundamentally alter the trajectory of a civilization in freefall.

The Harris Abyss

This is something new in America, and Harris is its herald. Here is a candidate who has avoided the testing fire of the primary process, gives no interviews, and routinely speaks in a patois of decaffeinated bromides deliberately evacuated of all meaning, as if Nietzsche’s abyss was not merely gazing back at us, but asking us to vote for it.

Harris is the non-candidate, the hero of all those who care nothing for substance and scarcely care about being American. It’s instructive in this respect to recall Michelle Obama’s assertion to the convention that “no one has a monopoly on what it means to be an American,” a chilling dictum which is to be commended solely for managing to transgress common sense, common decency, immigration law, international law, and the Constitution itself, all at once.

What’s really being said here is that America means nothing: That the United States is a borderless economic zone, a Canada in waiting. Indeed, if Americans want a vision of the future they need only look north. The moribund monarchy across the 49^th Parallel is a sort of Beta project for the America of the Democrats’ feverish imaginings: Post-national, leftist, statist, rainbow-liveried, contemptuous of its founding stock, and increasingly malfunctional.

This was the vision communicated in Chicago, and given a Harris/Walz victory the vision which will accelerate America’s ongoing decline from functional First-World Superpower to sectarian, semi-failed state, the product of a campaign of willful social and cultural vandalism achieved in just one generation.

November is a national-historical crossroads which makes the choice in 2016 look like a dilemma over rival brands of breakfast cereal. Harris and Walz, and perhaps even more so the people machinating behind them, offer an early warning of a self-consciously doctrinaire future where, as we have been warned, Americans will no longer have a monopoly on what it means to be an American, or, for that matter, what America itself is supposed to mean.

Biden was the last President who could invoke the Founding Fathers — albeit in a muddled and self-serving way — and just about get away with it. With his passing, the torch is handed to people who explicitly view the men who conjured a classically-informed republic out of a wilderness as the enemy, whose names and images we can be sure will one day be stricken from the monuments like the heretical Pharaohs of old.

When the unembarrassed socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells a raucous crowd, as she did in Chicago, that “We will not go back, we will choose a new path,” we should all pay attention, before concluding by way of weary consolation: The left has lost its collective mind. And it’s the only mind they had.

READ MORE from Phillip Mark McGough:

Trump and the Ultimate ‘Bull Moose’ Moment

WATCH MORE:

The Spectator P.M. Podcast Ep. 69: Harris and the DNC Have a Biden Problem

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