Can Harris Bridge the Great Divide?
Can Harris Bridge the Great Divide?
The street is not with the vice president.
CHICAGO—The former President Donald Trump’s seeming desire over the past few weeks to hand the election to Vice President Kamala Harris has understandably obscured a number of very real divisions that still plague the Democratic Party at the start of its convention week in Chicago. The question that ought to haunt the dreams of Democratic partisans and their friends in the media is whether Harris can (or even wants to) bridge the great divide between the street, as exemplified by the protests taking place outside the convention, and the party establishment.
The first and most important split between progressive activists and the vast majority of the Democratic delegates has to do with the matter of the administration’s slavish deference toward Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime. The specter of tens of thousands of antiwar protesters descending on the streets of Chicago did little to dissuade President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken from approving, only last week, $20 billion dollars in arms sales to Tel Aviv. The package includes, among other niceties, 50 F-15IA and F-15I fighter jets, 37,739 120mm tank rounds and 50,000 120mm mortar rounds. All of which, if nothing else, brings to mind the philosopher Simone Weil’s observation that “evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.”
As of now, the party establishment seems bound and determined to ignore the demands of the street. Harris herself was fairly explicit on that point only last week when confronted at a speech in Michigan were antiwar activists interrupted her speech by chanting, “We won’t vote for genocide.” Harris’s response was nothing if not cavalier: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
And this seems to be the general attitude of the Democratic establishment toward those who are dissenting from the program: so desperate are they to win, they will, as Weil once observed, excuse just about anything.
The longtime Washington Post columnist Colbert King was one among many warning the activists not to ruin Kamala’s coronation. A week before the convention, King took to his column to warn that, “What followed in ’68 is no prescription for today.”
“Tear up next week’s convention, fuel disarray, drag down [Kamala] Harris and make a second [Donald] Trump administration happen,” wrote King. “See where that gets Gaza and the West Bank.”
Of course the attitude of the establishment isn’t lost on the protesters.
Thomas, a labor activist from Chicago, told The American Conservative, “If Vice President Harris doesn’t change course, she’s going to own this genocide. And a lot of people that otherwise may have voted for her are going to stay home.”
Ann, who traveled to Chicago from New York with Jewish Voices for Peace, told TAC, “I do not want to vote for Trump. But why isn’t Kamala Harris afraid? She clearly doesn’t think she needs our votes because she’s not going for the vote. I want to be able to support her. If she does not move the needle and has more to say, if she doesn’t have an action planned, she will not get my vote.”
A panel convened this afternoon at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs barely touched on the issue of the Israeli war. The former U.S. ambassador to the UN Susan Rice and Maryland’s Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen were in agreement that the principal challenge facing the U.S. centered around great power competition, a global competition between authoritarian states and Western democracies. Like for their Republican counterparts, for the Democratic foreign policy establishment, China, which Rice described as “aggressive, self-oriented and uninterested in cooperation,” looms large. The ongoing U.S.-funded genocide? Not so much. When it did come up, Van Hollen reiterated Israel’s “right to defend itself” while tepidly acknowledging the plain fact that Gaza is now, in his words, “a wasteland.”
Democratic politicians and partisans may want to, but cannot, simply wish away tens of thousands of protesters. The strategy of ignoring and belittling them—which the Democratic establishment seems intent on pursuing—may cause them grief come November.
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