Richard discusses Kamala Harris and the coming Democratic hegemony. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
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| Hi, everyone. | |
| This is Richard, and I'm going to offer a brief reaction to Kamala Harris's acceptance speech of the Democratic nomination for president. | |
| And I'm going to talk a little bit about the uniparty centrism and populism. | |
| So let me start with the immediate reaction. | |
| Kamala Harris's speech was very good. | |
| It was a well-written speech. | |
| And I think Harris should be given some credit for her speechwriter. | |
| She can always X something out. | |
| And she's the one who has to deliver it. | |
| And she delivered it well. | |
| There was a nice opening act discussing her life story. | |
| And the life story, you know, had the... | |
| Pull yourself up by the shoestrings component to it. | |
| It also had a certain diversity component to it. | |
| She had one line about her mother being a 5'2 brown woman who never took no for an answer or something like that. | |
| What I did notice about it was a lack of any sort of resentment politics. | |
| It didn't include the elements that drive conservatives crazy from a Michelle Obama speech. | |
| It wasn't white people bad, to put it simply. | |
| It was community good. | |
| And that in itself was remarkable. | |
| She went on from there. | |
| She hit some very positive notes. | |
| And while watching it, and I was actually watching it with my Substack group, and I would encourage you to subscribe. | |
| Their end of... | |
| But it struck me as a speech that could have easily been delivered at the 2004 Republican Convention. | |
| And I mean that quite seriously. | |
| I'm not sure you would actually have to take out very much, and you could just copy and paste it and do it there. | |
| In other words, it was a Republican-sounding speech. | |
| I don't say this as an endorsement of that. | |
| I'm simply observing that fact. | |
| It was not a woke speech. | |
| I don't think I could point to a single element that could fairly be described as woke. | |
| It was a speech bereft of any sort of racial resentment, in fact. | |
| It was a speech that highlighted Kamala's experience as a prosecutor and included a section that was a sort of prosecution of Trump, a kind of opening statement | |
| or maybe closing argument in the trial of democracy. | |
| Donald Trump. | |
| That's a Republican vibe. | |
| When she talked about the United States military being lethal, I saw a sort of passion, a | |
| Glint in her eye, a sort of ferocity, if that's the right word, that I had not seen before. | |
| I think she meant it. | |
| She did not give a speech advocating humanitarianism or how the military should be disbanded or become a force for good and only deliver water to poor people or something. | |
| No, she described it as a lethal force. | |
| And she stuck behind NATO and took some credit, maybe rightly or wrongly, I don't quite know, | |
| Also, absent was the word salad that we became used to from Kamala over the past three and a half years. | |
| It became an ongoing joke. | |
| Is she herself demented? | |
| Is she drunk? | |
| What is she doing? | |
| Is this Heideggerian philosophy? | |
| I don't know. | |
| The time in which we live is the time in which we live. | |
| This weird, circular, sort of non-logical discussion. | |
| I don't know what to make of it. | |
| Perhaps we could chalk it up to she was terrified of overstepping her bounds or overshadowing Joe or saying something wrong. | |
| Who knows? | |
| But at this speech, she felt confident and she was unleashed. | |
| It was very good, very Republican. | |
| So what do we make of this? | |
| I think one thing that I've seen elsewhere that I agree with to a large extent is a uniparty. | |
| You know, in this election, assuming that there are three candidates, I mean, RFK is going to drop out today, but assuming there are three candidates, you have a choice between three fervent Zionists who are trying to out-Zionist-wise. | |
| And you saw that again with Kamala. | |
| She addressed the Palestine question, and she did three things. | |
| She first, and it's important that this came first, said that the Hamas attack is totally unacceptable, Jews are suffering, and we need to give them the weapons they need to fight off the terrorists. | |
| So that was, again, something you would hear from out of 2004. | |
| She offered some sympathy towards the Palestinians. | |
| This is outrageous. | |
| Too many people are dying. | |
| Aid is not getting in. | |
| Bibi bad, maybe, kind of, sort of, there. | |
| And then she said something remarkable. | |
| She used Wilsonian language. | |
| She said that the Palestinians need self-determination. | |
| So, in a way, she walked the type rope or threaded the needle. | |
| Whatever metaphor you wanted, she kind of was all things to all people. | |
| She first assured Zionists that she will continue to support Israel. | |
| That seems unwavering. | |
| She then offered what any reasonable or moral person would do, which is offer some sort of sympathy towards the suffering Palestinians. | |
| And then she also offered an answer. | |
| Which is a Palestinian state. | |
| Now, this has been a long-term project of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus. | |
| It's going nowhere. | |
| I mean, I don't even know what to say about a Palestinian state at this point. | |
| But regardless, she said it. | |
| And we should remember, back in 2004, this is something you would hear from Republicans. | |
| I mean, George W. Bush, for all his... | |
| Many failures, catastrophic failures. | |
| He was the one who actually allowed Hamas to be elected because he supported democracy in Palestine, in Gaza. | |
| That is a first step towards self-determination, that Wilsonian hundred-year project. | |
| So what she's saying is not terribly unusual. | |
| I mean, you can't listen to her speech and say, oh, she's a Palestinian, but a weak Palestinian. | |
| No, she came out hard as a Zionist. | |
| Now, again, I don't say this as an endorsement. | |
| I would not have delivered those words in that way, but I'm also willing to recognize reality. | |
| So there is a uniparty, three choices, all of which are the same, on Middle Eastern questions. | |
| And that is interesting. | |
| It's also, from my perspective, a bit depressing. | |
| So you could say that we have this uniparty. | |
| They put the woke away. | |
| They take a reasonable position on abortion. | |
| They talk about reproductive rights. | |
| Florida and the religious right and Trump's Supreme Court, they've gone too far. | |
| They're the extremists. | |
| We're the reasonable ones. | |
| The feminist tones are muted. | |
| The pro-transsexual tones are absent. | |
| And you have a sort of uniparty centrism. | |
| Now, where did this come from? | |
| I do think that this becoming the Republican Party comes directly out of the Republican Party's devil's bargain with Trump, as well as Trump's own devil's bargain with the religious right. | |
| So, when the Republican Party becomes pure Trumpism, it's about a man, it's a personality cult. | |
| Really an ideology. | |
| It is actually in opposition to all ideologies. | |
| It's in opposition to conservatism. | |
| It's in opposition to standard republicanism. | |
| It's in opposition to neoconservatism. | |
| It's in opposition to liberalism. | |
| It's in opposition to leftism because it's Trumpism. | |
| It's a pure personality cult that can be wielded like a weapon at any sort of enemy. | |
| That is, you know, again... | |
| It's not my cup of tea, but it is a remarkable thing. | |
| But when the entire Republican Party becomes that way, you just leave this huge open space that the Democrats can enter. | |
| So if it's just about Trump and how the FBI is out to get him and the justice system is completely unfair, And then you can kind of keep going down from there. | |
| You know, the vaccines are evil. | |
| I mean, Trump created the vaccine, of course, but the vaccines are evil. | |
| They want to kill you. | |
| The border crisis is actually done on purpose as some evil scheme to bring Hamas to America. | |
| Once you start going down that line, you're leaving... | |
| This open space that the Democrats can enter, and they have. | |
| They did not become the Marxist that Trump and the Republicans are claiming they are. | |
| They might have some semi- or quasi-Marxist policy, like price-gouging laws or something, and I would probably oppose those, but... | |
| That's not the tenor of the speech. | |
| That's not the tenor of the current Democratic Party. | |
| It is a centrist party. | |
| It's a hegemonic party. | |
| It is the uniparty. | |
| And Republicans are the opposition party. | |
| They are the Trump party. | |
| They are the deranged conspiratorial party. | |
| I do think that overall, that is a winner for the Democrats. | |
| What is populism? | |
| What is it? | |
| Is there any sort of policy that we could connect with populism in the United States? | |
| I don't think there is outside of an attack on any sort of elite. | |
| Whether it be the FBI, the NATO Alliance, the Disney Company, the Capitol Police. | |
| Any sort of elite established structure is viewed as evil and you hate it and you want to tear it down. | |
| That seems to be the sort of populism that has succeeded. | |
| And centrism itself becomes a sort of populism for the Democrats as they become. | |
| We are totally reasonable on the abortion question. | |
| Are going to help you out at the grocery store. | |
| We're going to give you 20k to buy a new home. | |
| If you become the hegemon... | |
| And the uniparty, then you can engage in your own sort of centrism. | |
| Excuse me. | |
| You can engage in your own sort of populism. | |
| Centrism becomes populism. | |
| We're going to let you off of $50,000 on your student loans. | |
| We're going to give you $20,000 to buy a new home. | |
| We're going to force grocery stores and providers to lower the cost of eggs and bacon and cheese, etc., etc. | |
| It can become a sort of populism that directly affects people. | |
| Now, the other devil's bargain that I mentioned was Donald Trump's devil's bargain with the religious right. | |
| And this is something that I have stressed many times, but is often forgotten. | |
| And that is that in 2015, up until the summer of 2016, Donald Trump was a remarkably secular, remarkably centrist, | |
| Sort of Democrat from the 1990s. | |
| He was against globalization. | |
| He wanted to protect American jobs. | |
| Yeah, that sounds like, I don't know, Paul Songus or Bernie Sanders. | |
| He wanted to protect Americans from too much immigration. | |
| Yeah, that sounds also like 90s Democrats and Bernie Sanders up to 2014 or something. | |
| Whatever he kind of turned on that issue. | |
| He didn't mention the gay question. | |
| He accepted gay marriage, in fact. | |
| Didn't want to talk about it. | |
| If anything, he'd brag about having the first transsexual beauty queen at his pageant or whatever. | |
| He also didn't talk about abortion. | |
| And this was in line with Donald Trump's adult life, which was a lot like that. | |
| And you can go and look back at Larry King interviews or his discussions around the Reform Party in the early 2000s. | |
| natural instinct is towards centrism. | |
| I could also mention his natural instinct for the past 25 years, if not longer, has been towards national health care system, socialized medicine. | |
| We're not going to leave people out in the streets is the line. | |
| He actually included an endorsement of a national healthcare system | |
| I think it was like a 2000 book, The Country We Deserve, or something like that. | |
| That's what he was in 2015. | |
| By the summer of 2016, he had more or less, maybe a little bit less than more, secured... | |
| The Republican nomination. | |
| And he engaged in an outreach to the religious right. | |
| So you have that notorious interview where he says, well, we might have to punish some women if they get an abortion. | |
| He would never have said that before. | |
| Before he needed the Republican vote. | |
| He went to Liberty University and is like, you know, you might not like me very much, but you gotta vote for me for the judges, for the judges. | |
| You know, he did all this just transactional. | |
| He offers to the religious right. | |
| And it worked. | |
| And four years later, you have evangelical preachers declaring that he's sent by God. | |
| He might be the Messiah himself. | |
| And they're speaking in tongues. | |
| They're coming from Alaska. | |
| They're coming from Mexico. | |
| They're coming from Africa for Trump to win. | |
| You know, that crazy lady. | |
| I believe her name is Paula White. | |
| So he made a devil's bargain. | |
| I think at this point ultimately has to pay for it. | |
| So there's no coherent ideology or policy program to populism or Trumpism. | |
| And so these things that have existed for some time, like the religious right or libertarianism, etc., they go in and fill in the gaps. | |
| So they say, what is the meaning of Trumpism? | |
| What is the meaning of this man who has dominated our headspaces for the last decade? | |
| What is the meaning of it? | |
| Anti-abortion. | |
| That's the meaning of it. | |
| This is something that has defined the religious right entirely and defined the Republican Party largely, became a shibboleth, for some 40 years. | |
| And so being that there's a lacuna, a vacuum in Trumpism, they fill up that hole with their stuff, with what they've been fighting for since anyone can remember. | |
| So Trump did it. | |
| He made the devil's bargain with the religious right when he needed it most, when his nomination was precarious. | |
| And now he has to pay for it. | |
| Because now he is being brought down by these people. | |
| And he doesn't even believe in their nonsense. | |
| Do you honestly think that Donald Trump Do you honestly think that Donald Trump is even a believing Christian? | |
| Do you honestly think in his heart of hearts that Donald Trump is a pro-lifer who thinks that life begins at conception and that abortion is murder? | |
| The answer is, of course, no. | |
| He doesn't even believe in this stuff, and yet he's allowing himself to be taken down by it. |