Part 2: Kamala Harris's road to nowhere

Harris wasn't a bad candidate - despite what a lot of people on both left and right seem to think. But she and her team couldn't outrun hugely unpopular Democratic policies.

(Second of two parts; Part 1 here.)

Lots of pundits have offered lots of theories as to why Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, despite vastly outspending him and receiving massive legacy media help.

But a few words from Harris herself offer the truest explanation for her defeat. They come early in her memoir, 107 Days, as she offers plans for the presidency:

I wanted to create a secretary of culture to uplift the immense creative talent of this country.

Oh, sure, a secretary of culture, makes sense — wait, what?

The United States has many problems. Creating culture isn’t one. American culture is maybe our most successful export, at every level and in all forms: television, podcasts, books, TikToks, movies, YouTube shorts, pop music, radio, musicals, Instagram reels, etc, ad infinitum.¹ China is ahead or closing on everything else, even biotechnology, but nobody outside the People’s Republic wants Chinese movies or music.

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(And Substacks. Don’t forget Substacks. PLEASE don’t forget Substacks!)

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So, no, the United States does not need a Secretary of Culture, a Department of Culture, a Ministry of Culture, a Commission on Culture. It probably doesn’t even need the National Endowment for the Arts.

In reality, American culture is so probably vibrant precisely because culture and the arts are relatively free of federal interference. It is not quite true that everything government touches dies, but Washington’s involvement in and competition with private business rarely leads to more creativity or lower costs.

Harris doesn’t seem to know this, though. Maybe that’s because because she has spent essentially her entire career working for the government as either a lawyer or a lawmaker. She put the “secretary of culture” idea out unsolicited. As far as I can tell, no one, even on the far left, was asking for it.

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Then again, given how aggressively the Biden administration grew the government, interfered with American businesses, and tried to take over personal medical decisions, Harris probably assumed a Department of Culture was the logical next step.

After all, without even asking for Congressional approval, much less receiving it, the Biden White House tried to:

Force healthy adults to take Covid vaccines;

Vastly expand avenues for immigration, first by essentially dropping all border restrictions, then by setting up “legal” pathways that had never been envisioned;

Block all evictions — a massive attack on homeowner property rights;

Press social media companies to ban disfavored speakers (as I know firsthand);

Give roughly $1 trillion to a favored constituency by canceling student loan debt;

Aggressively promote transgender policies, including prosecuting a Texas physician who tried to oppose them;

Work with blue states and public unions in 2021 to give teachers and many other government employees a second straight year of “working” from home;

Essentially phase out combustion engines for passenger vehicles.

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All those moves represented huge increases in federal power.

And all were highly unpopular outside the progressive establishment (with the sad exception of Covid censorship and vaccine mandates, which all too many Americans supported). Meanwhile, insane blue-state and city policies toward policing and drug use drove a notable breakdown in public order in cities like Chicago and Los Angeles.

But Kamala Harris was either too deep in the Democratic bubble to realize how despised the Biden Administration had become, or too beholden to her donors to be able to do anything about it.

In Part 1 of this piece, I wrote that during her campaign against Trump, “She didn’t make any big gaffes, with a single, very telling exception.”

I didn’t disclose the gaffe in Part 1 (oh, the suspense). But it was obvious even at the time. It was the moment on The View when — in the midst of the softest of softball questions — she was asked if she would have done “anything differently than President Biden during the last four years.”

Her answer: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Oops.

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(A View to a Kill)

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Kamala Harris lost the election that day.

She didn’t lose because she ran a poor campaign — her campaign was not perfect, but no campaign is.

She lost because Democratic policies on cultural issues are badly out of touch — and because Americans are highly wary of efforts to further expand the federal bureaucracy and aggressive government economic intervention generally and decarbonization in particular.

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(No bureaucracy here, which is why Unreported Truths costs pennies a day.)

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As Nate Cohn explained in the New York Times in an smart piece three weeks ago (paywall removed), the Republican populist turn means that Republicans have largely quit trying to cut back — much less eliminate — Social Security or Medicare, two entitlement programs that most Americans broadly support.

In doing so, Republicans have made themselves harder to attack as the party of the wealthy, even as Democrats call for further, less popular government expansions and programs. As Cohn wrote:

For a long time, Democrats succeeded politically by promising to protect postwar prosperity against conservatives who would roll back Medicare and Social Security, or against unfair trade deals that shipped jobs overseas. With Mr. Trump promising to protect entitlements and campaigning against free trade, this winning Democratic playbook is gone.

Exactly.

Kamala Harris wrote in 107 Days that she had “so many ideas” to help young people. And the FIRST she mentioned? Her “ministry of culture.”

If that’s the best new idea the progressive establishment can spitball, Democrats are in a world of hurt.

As her memoir makes clear, Kamala didn’t lose because of who she was. She lost because of the policies she, and the Biden Administration, demanded.

And until the Democrats figure face that reality head-on, they are likely to continue to bleed voters.

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(Part 1 here.)

1. The handful of exceptions, like plays — where Britain competes — or opera, prove the rule. Those are subcultures prized by elites but with little economic impact. And American sports leagues are increasingly gaining share worldwide, although soccer remains the most popular sport overall.