Trump out-Foxed: The most telling thing about Kamala’s pyjama party

Kamala Harris’ speech accepting the Democratic nomination for the presidency was like the climactic moment of a four-day pyjama party, with a crowd of sleep-deprived, over-stimulated party guests in a state of political rapture. So she always was going to be received in adulation.

Perhaps her greatest achievement, even before her acceptance speech, has been to explode the common impression that Donald Trump was inevitable and unstoppable. She has not made herself inevitable or unstoppable, but she has electrified her party with a sense of possibility.

Kamala Harris was always going to be received in adulation. Credit: AP

But she sought something much more than the endorsement of a Democratic National Convention giddy with excitement. It was a time, Oprah Winfrey told the convention a day earlier, for “adult conversation”. And Harris gave America one.

Portraying Trump as divisive, she promised to fight for all, including those who didn’t vote for her, “a president who unites us around our highest aspirations”.

Her mother always taught her “never do anything half-assed, that’s a direct quote”, and she proved herself faithful to her mother’s advice. Her acceptance speech not only restated traditional Democrat values of justice and fairness but also made a bold play to claim three of the biggest political equities that the Republicans have owned for generations – freedom, patriotism and republicanism. She made a full-assed claim to all of America’s highest aspirations.

She reframed freedom and claimed it. The traditional Republican conception of freedom is freedom to bear arms, freedom from taxes, freedom from regulation and from government involvement in daily life generally.

But Harris reconceptualised freedom. She would sign a bill to “restore reproductive freedom”, providing abortion access nationwide.

Other fundamental freedoms were at stake, she said: “The freedom to live safe from gun violence – in our schools, communities and places of worship. The freedom to love who you love openly and with pride. The freedom to breathe clean air, drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis. And the freedom that unlocks all the others. The freedom to vote.”

Trump has abandoned key tenets of traditional Republican patriotism; Harris swooped and claimed it for herself. She seized on Trump’s distasteful dalliances with dictators, his rancid disrespect for America’s men and women in uniform – fallen US soldiers are “suckers and losers” to Trump – to assert a superior claim to patriotism. She wouldn’t “cosy up to autocrats”.

“As president,” she said, “I will never waver in defence of America’s security and ideals. Because, in the enduring struggle between democracy and tyranny, I know where I stand – and where the United States of America belongs.

Illustration by John Shakespeare

“As commander-in-chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. I will fulfil our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families. And I will always honour, and never disparage, their service and their sacrifice.”

Similarly, Trump has vacated high ideals of the republic – democracy, the rule of law, constitutionalism, each of them a special point of pride among traditional Republicans. Harris moved in.

“You can always trust me to put country above party and self. To hold sacred America’s fundamental principles. From the rule of law. To free and fair elections. To the peaceful transfer of power,” Harris said.

Bill Clinton once said that in the eyes of the American electorate, “strong and wrong beats weak and right”. Harris is campaigning as “strong and right”.

Transcending all of these virtues was a spirit of optimism. While Trump’s message is a dire drumbeat of a “failing America” and “American carnage”, Harris spoke brightly of America as the land of “endless opportunities”.

In the process of cementing the centre-left and enticing the centre-right, she has repudiated some of the policies that she advocated when she was running in 2019 as a candidate on the Democrat left. She no longer demands an end to fracking, no longer wants to abolish private health insurance and has withdrawn support for the “defund the police” movement. She’s also taken a much harder line against illegal immigration.

And, while she called in her acceptance speech for an urgent ceasefire in Gaza, her campaign refused to allocate a speaking slot to the pro-Palestinian agitators among the Democrat delegates in the room and their shock troops on the streets outside. In a four-day event, the campaign couldn’t find four minutes for the cause. A telling political marker.

Strikingly, all of these claims and contentions are about values and beliefs, not economics. Harris does put a quasi-economic ideal at the centre of her case for power – she will “rebuild the middle class”. It will be a defining goal, she told us. And she ran through a checklist of measures, the same handful of tax and other proposals she nominated in a speech last week.

But a commitment to rebuild the middle class is, in itself, a values statement. Middle class is defined, in part, by material wealth, but also by values of commitment to family, community and nation, by work ethic and respect for the law.

This seems odd. Americans consistently tell pollsters that economic issues are their No.1 priority. So why did Harris mention the cost of living only once? Give no commitments on job creation, for example, or economic growth? Inflation, interest rates and incomes went unmentioned.

“These culture issues are bigger than the economic issues,” says California Governor Gavin Newsom, a long-time colleague and sometimes competitor of Harris in the California Democratic milieu. “They trump all of them,” he tells me.

Newsom explains the shifting political battlefield. The Republicans, he says, have enjoyed enormous success in waging the so-called culture wars. “This rights regression in America is extraordinary. Bringing us back to a pre-1960s world, America in reverse, voting rights, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights across the spectrum. It’s not just abortion.”

Newsom says that Democrats must deliver on economic issues as a prerequisite, and that Joe Biden has delivered, but that culture and values have been “weaponised” potently against them: “You know, CRT [critical race theory], DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion], ESG [environmental, social and governance], anything with three letters – DOJ, FBI, I mean, it’s just this weaponisation. It’s about fear, it’s about anger. They’re golden oldies but they’re very powerful. I’ve been very out front on LGBTQ issues, obviously, marriage equality, but the attack and the assault on the trans community now is extraordinary, this sort of anti-woke agenda, which is just anti-black.

“When guys like Ron DeSantis [the Republican governor of Florida] say anti-woke, what they mean is anti-black, rewriting history, censoring historical facts. It’s a cultural purge. The book-banning binge they’ve been on, banning speech in the boardroom, the gag rules, private speech, not just the classrooms. It’s extraordinary how effective they’ve been.”

Newsom says that while the front line in this struggle is at the state level, a return of Trump would nationalise it. “If a bill for a national ban on abortion landed on his desk, he would sign it, there’s just no doubt.”

Trump has used immigration – and the unsubtle xenophobia in which he couches it – as the most powerful weapon in his political armoury. But Newsom says the experience in California shows that anti-immigrant movements reach a natural limit and then suffer pushback.

In the early 1990s, governor Pete Wilson tried to ban undocumented immigrants from using any public services. But it was overreach. “It led to a counter-movement and a counter-narrative. It was the beginning of the end of Republican Party in California,” Newsom says. The state was once a Republican stronghold and is now Democrat-dominated. “And I would argue that’s a cautionary tale today about what Trump and Trumpism is promoting.”

Trump is promising the mass deportation of all undocumented immigrants, estimated at somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people. Is that his point of overreach?

In part, the answer depends on Harris and the alternative that she’s offering, and whether anyone outside the pyjama party was listening. One early indicator that she’s managed, at the very least, to change the atmosphere was the treatment that Fox News gave Donald Trump immediately after Harris’ acceptance speech.

Trump phoned in to Fox to offer his critique and they duly put him to air. He launched into familiar tirades against Harris the Marxist, and how he was getting many more endorsements. Within a few minutes, the presenters started looking impatient at this old news. A minute later, they cut him off and bundled him off air.

“In this country,” said Harris, “anything is possible.” And that’s a fact.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.

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