The Electoral College. White racism. Black sexism. President Biden.
Should Kamala Harris lose the presidential election next month, those will be among the more convenient excuses Democrats will offer for falling short in a race against a staggeringly flawed, widely detested opponent. There will also be whispers that she was not the strongest candidate in the first place — that the party would have done better to elevate a more natural political talent like Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania or Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.
There’s truth in all of it. But it lets off the hook the main culprit: the way in which leading liberal voices in government, academia and media practice politics today. Consider its main components.
The politics of condescension, typified by Barack Obama’s suggestion this month that Black men might be reluctant to vote for Harris because they “just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president.” But perhaps those men are responding to something more mundane: Median weekly wages for full-time Black workers rose steeply during Donald Trump’s presidency and essentially stagnated under Biden, according to data from the St. Louis Fed. Why reach for the insulting explanation when a rational one will do?
The politics of name-calling, which happens every time Trump’s voters are told they are racists, misogynists, weird, phobic, low-information or, most recently, supporters of a fascist — and, by implication, fascists themselves. Aside from being gratuitous and self-defeating — what kind of voter is going to be won over by being called a name? — it’s also mostly wrong. Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly are people who think the Biden-Harris years have been bad for them and the country. Maybe liberals should try to engage the argument without belittling the person.
The politics of gaslighting, exemplified by all the MSNBC talking heads who repeatedly vouched for Biden’s mental acuity, when, as Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota has acknowledged, the president’s decline has been obvious for years. Now some of the same pundits are extolling Harris as brilliant and experienced, which may be true but is hardly evidenced by her seeming inability to move beyond a limited set of talking points or the fact that it’s difficult to think of a political or legislative accomplishment of which she was the prime mover.
The politics of highhandedness. Do liberals really believe there are no lingering resentments over the fact that Harris secured her nomination through the immediate endorsement of party grandees without winning a single primary or facing a single challenger? Most Democrats seem fine with it, but this is a race in which the votes of skeptical independents may count more than ever. A Democratic Party that claims to be defending democracy without bothering to practice it is not going to endear itself to voters it needs to win.