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Can Kamala Harris Be the Unlikeliest of Heroes?
If the study of the past teaches us anything, it is that history is often driven by unlikely heroes who rose to the occasion in an hour of dire need.
Aug 03, 2024
At first glance, Kamala Harris may seem an unlikely savior of democracy. As a career prosecutor, including stints as the district attorney of San Francisco and the attorney general of California, she specialized in sending people to jail and prison, adding to the nation’s crisis of mass incarceration. As a senator and failed 2020 presidential candidate, she was often accused of opportunism. As vice president, she operated largely out of public view for three years, and was saddled with disapproval ratings that rivaled and sometimes exceeded those of President Joe Biden.
But if the study of the past teaches us anything, it is that history is often driven by unlikely heroes who rose to the occasion in an hour of dire need. Abraham Lincoln, born into poverty in a log cabin in Kentucky, ended chattel slavery and defeated the Confederacy in the Civil War. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born into wealth and privilege, oversaw New Deal programs that rescued the American working class from the Great Depression and a world war that defeated the Nazis.
Harris may never be mentioned alongside Lincoln and FDR, but she is off to a good start. She has already rescued the Democrats from certain defeat in November and energized the party’s base in a way not seen since Barack Obama in 2008. Barring the unforeseeable, she will be the Democratic nominee, and, if the election breaks her way, she will make history as the first female president.
This late in the election cycle, Harris is the only realistic alternative to Trump and all that he stands for.
Harris will campaign for the presidency at a time of national emergency born from the dark impulses of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he leads. There are many ways to understand and characterize Trumpism, a phenomenon that is at once authoritarian, racist, misogynistic and reactionary. I was among the first opinion writers to refer to Trump explicitly as a fascist, and I continue to believe there is no better label to describe his behavior, psychopathology, support for white supremacy, nostalgia for a mythical past and dictatorial aspirations.
Whether Harris ultimately decides to pin the “F” word on Trump — and to-date (unlike Biden) she has not — it is imperative that she defines Trumpism and the stakes in the election in stark and unmistakable terms. In a speech delivered in Wisconsin on July 23, two days after Biden announced his withdrawal from the race, she did just that, framing the election as a choice between “freedom, compassion and the rule of law, [and] … chaos, fear and hate.”
To win, Harris will have to do more than highlight Trump’s negatives or promote herself as a seasoned prosecutor capable of standing up to her opponent. The “cop versus con” slogan that has emerged in the early going is catchy but insufficient. A successful campaign will require the formulation of a forward-looking positive agenda. In this regard, too, Harris has made considerable strides.
Appearing before the Zeta Phi Beta sorority in Indianapolis on July 24, she began to sketch the outlines of that agenda while at the same time boycotting Bibi Netanyahu’s war-mongering address to Congress. Harris set herself up as the perfect foil to Trump — a multiracial woman who, at age 59, is younger, more vital and more articulate than the former president, who turned 78 in June and is showing the same signs of cognitive decline that drove Biden into retirement. “We face a choice between two different visions,” she told the cheering crowd of 6,000. “One focused on the future, the other focused on the past. With your support, I am fighting for our nation’s future.”
Harris touted the Biden administration’s achievements in reducing student debt, broadening assistance for new mothers and cutting child poverty. Looking ahead, she pledged to expand affordable health care, secure childcare and eldercare for all Americans, establish universal paid maternity leave and restore the right to abortion.
“Across our nation,” she declared, “we are witnessing a full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights. The freedom to vote. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to live without fear of bigotry and hate. The freedom to love who you love openly … the freedom to learn and acknowledge our true and whole history, and the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”
In what may be the dominant theme of her campaign, she tarred Trump and the GOP as “extremists” who want to “take us back, but we are not going back.”
On July 25, at a gathering of the American Federation of Teachers in Houston, she expanded on her vision for the future, vowing to sign both the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act into law, and to pass an assault weapons ban.
A successful campaign will require the formulation of a forward-looking positive agenda.
Back in Washington on July 25, she unexpectedly moved left on the war in Gaza in a press conference held after meeting privately with Netanyahu. In contrast to the deference Biden has shown to the Israeli prime minister, she said that while she recognizes Israel’s right to self-defense and denounces Hamas for the “horrific acts of sexual violence” committed on Oct. 7, “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies [committed by the Israeli military] in Gaza. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.” She called for a ceasefire, the release of the hostages and the establishment of a Palestinian state, adding, “As I just told Prime Minister Netanyahu, it is time to get this deal done.”
Harris is not a perfect candidate for all voters, and in the coming weeks and months, she will come under withering attacks by Trump and the GOP, who have already begun to mock her for her distinctive laugh and for being “a childless cat lady.”
Such slanders paid great dividends for Trump in 2016, and to rebut the attacks this time will require a united front akin to the effort mounted by the French electorate that blocked the far right from taking power in June. This late in the election cycle, Harris is the only realistic alternative to Trump and all that he stands for. We have much to gain from supporting her, and everything to lose if we don’t.
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Americans Are Wising Up to the GOP’s Tired Trickle-Down Scam
Trump and other Republican politicians are trying their best to revive their nonsensical horse-and-sparrow supply-side rationale so the rest of us can pay to make the rich far richer.
Jun 13, 2024
They’re at it again. And it’s not even original: The trickle-down economics that two-dozen Republican governors and former U.S. President Donald Trump are reviving as you read these words has a long history.
“Trickle down,” of course, was the theory advanced by former President Ronald Reagan that if America only made rich people massively richer with staggering tax cuts, ending anti-trust regulation, and government subsidies for their industries, they would use all that extra free money to build new factories, hire people, and the abundance would trickle down to the average worker.
It was a lie, but it wasn’t the first time the GOP had tried that lie. Then knew exactly what they were doing, and what outcome it would produce. Instead of raising the pay of their workers, the rich people on the receiving end of Reagan’s, Bush’s, and Trump’s tax cuts simply added the cash to their money bins and investments, bought new yachts or trophy wives, and blasted themselves into outer space on penis-shaped rockets.
Thankfully, the Biden administration and this generation of Democratic politicians have rejected Reagan’s neoliberalism and low-tax ideology in favor of what centuries of history shows us works: for the wealthy to again pay their fair share of taxes to sustain the commons.
Nonetheless, Republican politicians think we haven’t noticed and they’re trying to pull it off again at both the state and federal level. A bill with 102 GOP co-sponsors (the Tax Cuts and Jobs Permanency Act) is in motion in the House of Representatives right now to double-down on Trump’s tax cuts.
How did we get here, and why are they still pushing something that’s so discredited it’s become a punch-line for late-night comedians?
The GOP was captured by the morbidly rich in the 1880s and has been dancing to their tune ever since, regularly throwing bones to bigots, religious zealots, womanhaters, and gun nuts to get enough votes to hold power.
Ever since that era, their main focus has been to increase the wealth of the morbidly rich while keeping down wages and saddling average people with as much debt as possible. As I’ve explained before, conservatives believe this crushing of the middle class is the best way to “ensure social stability” and thus “save America.”
The first Democratic president to call Republicans out for that era’s version of trickle-down economics (which back then, before income taxes, had to do with suppressing wages, fighting the early union movement, and letting industrial oligarchs wipe out small competitors) was Grover Cleveland, in his 1888 State of the Union speech:
As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.
But the first tax on wealthy Americans went into place way before that, in 1839, shepherded through Congress by Representative Abraham Lincoln. It was a tax on luxury items and expensive land exclusively owned by rich people. As Lincoln wrote to his friend William Wait on March 2, 1839:
I believe it can be sustained, because it does not increase the tax upon the “many poor” but upon the “wealthy few”… [which] by taxing [luxuries and land], as is well known, that belong, not to the poor, but to the wealthy citizen.
On the other hand, the wealthy can not justly complain, because the change is equitable within itself, and also a sine qua non to a compliance with the Constitution. If, however, the wealthy should, regardless of the justness of the complaint, as men often are, when interest is involved in the question, complain of the change, it is still to be remembered, that they are not sufficiently numerous to carry the elections.
Lincoln followed up as president with the nation’s first income tax in 1861, put into place to fund the Civil War. It was also a progressive tax; it only hit people who made above $800 ($32,000 today).
However, taxing the rich to pay for the needs of the nation was also an idea that long predated even Lincoln. As former President Thomas Jefferson wrote to Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours in 1811:
We are all the more reconciled to the tax on importations, because it falls exclusively on the rich, and, with the equal partition of intestate’s estates, constitute the best agrarian law. In fact, the poor man in this country who uses nothing but what is made within his own farm or family, or within the U.S. pays not a farthing of tax to the general government, but on his salt; and should we go into that manufacture, as we ought to do, he will pay not one cent.
Our revenues once liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., and the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone without his being called on to spare a cent from his earnings. The path we are now pursuing leads directly to this end which we cannot fail to attain unless our administration should fall into unwise hands.
Following Cleveland’s calling out of the morbidly rich of his day, late 19th-century advocates for that class came up with the “horse and sparrow” theory of taxation. This was back in the day when everybody used horses for transportation and people were used to seeing small birds pecking undigested grain from the horses’ droppings that filled America’s streets.
The sales-pitch was that if you fed horses extra oats, more than they could normally digest, they’d pass through all that undigested oat into their manure for the sparrows to pick at; rich people’s excesses, in other words, would spill over to the average “sparrow” working person. It was embraced by Republicans in Congress and not only didn’t it work; it was blamed, in part, for the Panic of 1896.
Republican Warren Harding revived Horse and Sparrow economics in 1920 (many people still owned horses) when he campaigned on dropping the then-91% top income tax bracket down to 25%. He was elected and kept his promise, the result being the “Roaring 20s” when the rich got fabulously richer while working people saw their wages actually drop (leading to an explosion of unionization efforts by pissed-off workers that were violently suppressed by employers and police).
It all came to a startling and final end in October, 1929 with the Great Crash that set off what was then called the Republican Great Depression (the “Republican” part of that label largely wore off after the election of Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in 1952).
Republicans stopped talking about horses and sparrows around that time, but the theory never really died; Reagan simply reinvented it in 1980 as “Supply-Side Economics,” aka trickle-down.
Today, Republican politicians—heavily supported by right-wing billionaires since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery—are trying their best to revive their nonsensical horse-and-sparrow trickle-down rationale so the rest of us can pay to make the rich far richer. Trump promises to renew his expiring tax cuts for billionaires if he’s elected, which the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says will add another $4.6 trillion to the $7 trillion deficit he gave us during his four years in office.
In Kansas, Republican legislators keep pushing through new tax cuts for the rich (one would reportedly cut Charles Koch’s tax bill this year by almost a half-million dollars) and Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly keeps vetoing them. Republican legislatures in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania just passed tax cuts for the wealthy totaling $2 billion and $3 billion respectively, although both states have Democratic governors who will veto such legislation.
In Mississippi, however, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves and his GOP colleagues in that state’s legislature have radically and repeatedly cut taxes, threatening to eliminate the income tax (which produces a third of the state’s revenue) altogether. Rich Mississippians will be fine; the necessary cuts will fall on the poor and the state’s educational and physical infrastructure, which are not much used by the very wealthy who fund Reeves anyway; they send their kids to private schools and fly private jets.
Other Republican-controlled states are seeing similar actions to raise taxes and fees on working class people while cutting taxes on the morbidly rich. Georgia’s Republicans just cut state taxes by a billion dollars; North Carolina reduced their income tax on the richest from 5.5% to 3.99%; and Iowa is trying to transition to a flat tax so that even the poorest of workers must pay the same tax rate as that state’s most wealthy, who will see a huge tax cut.
Altogether, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, just between 2021 and 2023:
Twenty-six states cut their personal income tax rates and/or corporate income tax rates, 13 of them multiple times… Combined, the cuts will cost those 26 states an estimated $124 billion by 2028, including $13 billion that they have already lost (2022-2023) and $111 billion over the next five years (2024-2028)… This 3.6% share is equivalent to more than a third of states’ general fund spending on higher education and more than half of what goes to state correctional systems.
Thankfully, the Biden administration and this generation of Democratic politicians have rejected Reagan’s neoliberalism and low-tax ideology in favor of what centuries of history shows us works: for the wealthy to again pay their fair share of taxes to sustain the commons.
As President Joe Biden told an audience just last week:
We’ve gone from trickle-down economics to the point where we’re in a situation where we build from the middle class out and the bottom up. And that way the wealthy still do very well. No one wealthy is hurting at all. We’re in good shape. So, we have to keep it going that way.
Republicans have been hustling this scam for over 150 years, and in the states they control educational outcomes are plummeting, child and infant mortality is skyrocketing (along with homicides), and infrastructure threatens to disintegrate as funding cuts come online.
Nonetheless, it finally seems Americans are catching on and increasingly rejecting horses, sparrows, and politicians who try to sell them on more trickle-down tax cuts for the rich.
More Americans need to know this history. Pass it along.
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'We Are Not Denmark': Hillary Clinton and Liberal American Exceptionalism
Feb 26, 2016
Several months removed, it now seems clear that the Democratic debate on October 13 contained an illuminating moment that has come to embody the 2016 Democratic Primary and the key differences between its two candidates. Confronting Bernie Sanders's insistence that the United States has much to learn from more socialized nations, particularly the Nordic Model, Hillary Clinton was direct: "I love Denmark. But we are not Denmark. We are the United States of America."
"America's twenty-first-century 'exceptions' appear as dubious distinctions: gun violence, carbon emissions, mass incarceration, wealth inequality, racial disparities, capital punishment, child poverty, and military spending." The implication behind this statement--the reasoning that ideas and institutions (in this case, social and economic programs) that are successful in other nations are somehow practically or ideologically inconsistent with Americans and American principles--speaks to a longstanding sociopolitical framework that has justified everything from continental expansion to the Iraq War: American exceptionalism. Rooted in the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and the mythology of John Winthrop's "City Upon a Hill," the notion that the history and mission of the United States and the superiority of its political and economic traditions makes it impervious to the same forces that influence other peoples has coursed through Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," the Cold War rhetoric of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and the foreign policy declarations of Barack Obama.
Despite particular historical trends--early and relatively stable political democracy, birthright citizenship, the absence of a feudal tradition, the relative weakness of class consciousness--historians have critiqued this "American exceptionalism" as far more fictive than physical, frequently citing the concept as a form of state mythology. Although different histories lead naturally to historical and perhaps even structural dissimilarities, America's twenty-first-century "exceptions" appear as dubious distinctions: gun violence, carbon emissions, mass incarceration, wealth inequality, racial disparities, capital punishment, child poverty, and military spending.
Yet even when American exceptionalism has never been more challenged by empirically validated social and economic data and in public conversation, the concept continues to play an elemental role in our two-party political discourse. The Republican Party is, of course, awash with spurious, almost comically stupid dialogue about a mythic American past--"making America great again"--the racial and ethnic undertones of which are unmistakable. Those same Republicans have lambasted Obama and other high-profile Democrats for not believing sufficiently in their brand of innate, transhistoric American supremacy.
But this Americentrism is not the sole province of the GOP. We need to look no further than bipartisan support for the military-industrial complex and the surveillance state to see that national exceptionalism and its explicit double standard toward other nations resides comfortably within the Democratic Party as well. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa censured Obama's use of the term in the fall of 2013, with the latter likening it to the "chosen race" theories of Nazi Germany. Hyperbole notwithstanding, academics often associate American exceptionalism with military conquest. After all, it has deep roots in the Manifest Destiny ethos that spurred the Mexican War, drove the continental and trans-Pacific expansion, and emerged as a paternalistic justification for voluminous military interventions in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. As Dick Cheney suggests, "the world needs a powerful America." In this unilateral missionizing zeal, Clinton proves most typical. As historian Michael Kazin argues in a recent piece for The Nation: "Hillary Clinton is best described as a liberal. Like every liberal president (and most failed Democratic nominees) since Wilson, she wants the United States to be the dominant power in the world, so she doesn't question the massive sums spent on the military and the other branches of the national security state."
"Clinton's brand of American exceptionalism goes beyond the issue of American military dominion and into mid-century social liberalism and, more specifically, the neoliberalism that has since replaced it."
However, Clinton's brand of American exceptionalism goes beyond the issue of American military dominion and into the policy potentials of mid-century social liberalism and, more specifically, the neoliberalism that has since replaced it. Indeed, since George McGovern's failed presidential bid of 1972, neoliberals, moving decidedly rightward on economic issues, have consistently employed exceptionalist code to fight off movements, ideas, and challengers from the left. The victims include leftist efforts toward both American demilitarization and the expansion of a "socialistic" welfare state. Socialist feminist Liza Featherstone and others have denounced Clinton's uncritical praise of the "opportunity" and "freedom" of American capitalism vis-a-vis other developed nations. "With this bit of frankness," Featherstone explains, referring to the former Secretary of State's "Denmark" comments, "Clinton helpfully explained why no socialist--indeed, no non-millionaire--should support her. She is smart enough to know that women in the United States endure far more poverty, unemployment, and food insecurity than women in Denmark--yet she shamelessly made clear that she was happy to keep it that way." Indeed, Clinton's denunciation of the idea that the United States should look more like Denmark betrayed one of the glaring fault lines within the Democratic Party and between Clintonian liberalism and Sandersite leftism. It also revealed a more clandestine strain of American exceptionalism common among liberals and the Democratic Party elite in which "opportunity" serves as a stand-in for wider egalitarian reform. As Elizabeth Bruenig highlighted in The New Republic: "Since getting ahead on one's grit is such a key part of the American narrative, it's easy to see how voters might be attracted to Clinton's opportunity-based answer to our social and economic woes, though it leaves the problem of inequality vastly under-addressed. Indeed, a kind of American exceptionalism does seem to underpin much opportunity-focused political rhetoric."
This preference for insider politics (rather than mass movements involving direct action) and limited, means-tested social programs speaks to a broader truth about modern liberalism: it functions in a way that not only doesn't challenge the basic tenets of American exceptionalism, it often reinforces them. Whether vindicating war and torture and civil liberties violations, talking past the War on Drugs and the carceral state, or exhibiting coolness toward the type of popular protest seen during Occupy Wall Street, with its direct attacks on a sort of American Sonderweg, establishment Democrats are adept at using a more "realistic" brand of Americentrism to consolidate power and anchor the party in the status quo. The 2016 Democratic Primary has seen progressive ideas, including universal health care, tuition-free college, and a living minimum wage, all hallmarks of large swaths of the rest of the developed world, delegitimized through some mutation of liberal exceptionalist thinking. These broadminded reforms are apparently off limits, not because they are not good ideas (though opponents make that appraisal, too), but because somehow their unachievability is exceptional to the United States.
"Broadminded reforms are apparently off limits, not simply because they are not good ideas... but because somehow their unachievability is exceptional to the United States." All this is not to exclude (despite his "democratic socialist" professions) Sanders's own milder brand of "America first," most evident in his economic nationalism, but to emphasize that American exceptionalism and the logical and practical dangers it poses exist in degrees across a spectrum of American politics. Whatever his nationalistic inclinations, Sanders's constant reiteration of America's need to learn from and adapt to other nations' social, economic, and political models demonstrates an ethno-flexibility rarely seen in American major party politics. "Every other major country..." might as well be his official campaign slogan. This bilateral outlook does not fit nearly as neatly within Clinton's traditional liberal paradigm that, from defenses of American war and empire to the, uses American exceptionalism tactically, dismissing its conservative adherents as nationalist overkill yet quietly exploiting the theory when politically or personally expeditious.
In looking beyond our national shores and domestic origin sources for fresh and functional policy, Sanders seems to grasp that, from the so-called "foreign influences" of the Republican free soil program or Robert La Follette's Wisconsin Idea or even Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, American high politics have been at their most morally creative and sweepingly influential not only when swayed by direct action and mass movements, but also when the constraints of ethnocentrism and exceptionalism less impede them. The "We are not Denmark" sentiment might appear benign, lacking as it does the bluster of Republican claims to national supremacy and imaginary "golden age" pasts and what economist Thomas Picketty has termed a "mythical capitalism." But it is the "seriousness" and very gentility of liberal Americentrism that underscores the power, omnipresence, and intellectual poverty of cultural dismissal. "I still believe in American exceptionalism," Clinton has proclaimed in pushing for U.S. military escalation in Syria. Indeed, she does, and it is not relegated to foreign policy.
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