Kamala Harris Might Be Better for the Left than Joe Biden

I initially had this as its own section in my reaction piece to Joe Biden stepping down from the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris, but I feel like it deserves its own post since this is the only substantive part of my reaction. It’s hard to get too ideological when we’re just trying to regain control of a car careening down a mountainside driving all of us to certain doom, and many on the left have come to accept Harris as an ironic concession to the rigid constraints of reality.

Also the coconut memes are fun.

This headline could easily blow up in my face just like my Joe Biden Has No Chance headline from 2018, as Kamala Harris has been difficult to pin down ideologically. She has endorsed Medicare for All and the Green New Deal before kind of backracking, and her overtures to the left have lacked commitment, which weren’t aided by the fact that she dropped out of the primary before a single vote was cast. There are reasons to distrust her, but there is also evidence to believe that she could build on the advancements Biden has made, while picking up the slack in areas he has failed in.

Many on the left assumed at the beginning of the 2020 primary that Biden was one of the worst options for us, as his establishment bona fides rendered him our enemy, but the fact is he advanced our legislative agenda further than any president since Lyndon B. Johnson. Biden’s Vice President has been, shall we say, malleable, as she has climbed the ranks in her political career and established positions generally to Biden’s left, and the concern with any politician is that they are lying so they can enact their own ideological agenda once in power. That may be how cynical ideological politicians operate (like Barack Obama, but at least half the party ain’t ready for that conversation), but for a transactional politician, this chameleon-like quality can be genuinely earnest.

Biden adopted policies he never pushed for in the primary because he wanted power, and saw placating the Bernie coalition as his route to do so. Like I detailed last week in theorizing why AOC and Bernie Sanders were strongly backing Biden, having transactional politicians in power has proven to be immensely helpful to advance lefty legislation, as Iraq War voter and Green New Deal enthusiast Ed Markey has proven in the Senate. It’s not President AOC or President Omar, but it’s a hell of a lot better than Barack Obama and the Clintonian cadre of neoliberals practicing a bankrupt 20th century ideology that has helped carve the path to hell.

Not to mention, as Dave Levitan excellently detailed for Splinter today, based on what she has demonstrated so far, her potential climate policies “seem pretty promising.”

It’s too early to say for certain where Kamala falls on the transactional to ideological scale, but she is inheriting a transactional president’s campaign who made genuine inroads with the left and established the greatest domestic policy legacy in a generation. Joe Biden reportedly has said “Barack would be jealous” many a time in the Oval Office, and he is right as Barack is reportedly sensitive about Joe’s accomplishments. One cannot hope that some of Biden’s ambitious resentment to out-perform his predecessor has brushed off on Harris.

Even if she is more ideological than Biden, she still inherits his coalition that includes a significant seat at the table for lefties. We are unfortunately, forever shut out of American foreign policy decisions, save for Biden’s hasty Afghanistan withdrawal that doomed him with Independents, and it is not clear whether she could halt the Israeli genocide in Gaza. There is some hope however, that she could be more aggressive in her attempts to constrain the Netanyahu regime, as reporting indicates she is more sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle and Biden has long since proven that he is a supporter of Israeli depravity. Relative to the baseline, this could be the biggest improvement between a Biden and Harris administration.

Whether Kamala Harris has the political skills or ideological lean needed to help advance progressivism is extremely TBD, but she is not as weak as an aged Biden entering a second term would be. She gives the Democrats hope that they could capture Congress while it was almost totally off the table for Biden, and even a neoliberal Harris with a Democratic Congress is still better than a transactional, dysfunctional Biden with a Republican Congress. It will take work by the left to pull Harris in our direction, but there is plenty of evidence indicating she is amenable to it. In this sclerotic and collapsing political system designed by 18th century elites, that’s about as good as us lefties can hope for.