What identity politics will Kamala Harris practise?
When it comes to taking advantage of identity in politics, the two most effective American candidates this century have been Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Mr Obama had written the best campaign book ever, “Dreams from My Father”, sorting out his own identity. But as a candidate in 2008 he recognised that his identity would speak most eloquently for itself, as would the historic nature of his campaign, implicitly but incandescently illuminating his message of change. By not stressing the obstacles he had to overcome to travel so far as a black man, he made the prospect of his election a compliment not to himself but to America, for overcoming the burden of history. It was maybe the most elegant judo move in American politics, one that turned the weight of racism against itself. “Yes we can,” voters found themselves saying along with him. Mr Obama carried 52.9% of the popular vote, still the largest margin of any president since 1988.
Mr Trump’s approach has been different, since long before he began spreading suspicions that Mr Obama, with his black skin and strange name, was not born an American. Mr Trump’s views of the politics of identity were annealed in the racial and ethnic furnace of New York in the 1970s and 1980s, when a gain for one group was a loss for another. The divisions among categories of people were gaps into which political wedges could be driven. Hence his talk recently of migrants “taking black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs”. This approach has never yet won him a majority.
Mr Trump considered diverse contenders as his pick for vice-president, but in the end chose a running-mate who made his name as a tribune of Mr Trump’s political base. A Republican senator from Ohio, J.D. Vance is the author of another fine autobiography, “Hillbilly Elegy”, in which he too explores his own identity. “I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scotch-Irish descent who have no college degree,” he wrote. “Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks or white trash.”
Unlike Mr Obama, Mr Vance continued after publication to substantially revise his understanding, or at least his presentation, of his identity. From holding poor white people such as those he called “welfare queens” responsible for their own bad choices, Mr Vance came to view them as victims. As he did in his speech to the Republican National Convention on July 17th, he now blames the “ruling class” for making the bad decisions, condemning those in “the American heartland” to joblessness and addiction. He also no longer emphasises that he and the people with whom he identifies are white. As a candidate he seems to recognise, as Mr Obama did, that his racial identity can announce itself.
But very unlike Mr Obama, Mr Vance appears to be spoiling for a fight over race. “Are you a racist?” he asked, pointing his finger at the viewer in an advertisement during his Senate campaign two years ago. He said “the media calls us racist” for wanting to build a wall along the southern border. “Whatever they call us, we will put America first,” he concluded. This is a politics Mr Obama anticipated but failed to defuse. When he was compelled by a political crisis to tackle race head-on in 2008, he gave a penetrating speech in Philadelphia in which he spoke of the sources of black anger and noted: “And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognising they are grounded in legitimate concerns—this too widens the racial divide and blocks the path to understanding.”
That seems like a long time ago. One of the themes of Mr Trump’s campaign is that Democrats are enacting policies biased against white people. “I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country and that can’t be allowed,” he told Time magazine in April. “There’s absolutely a bias against white.”
This is the treacherous terrain onto which Vice-President Kamala Harris is stepping as the presumptive Democratic nominee. By virtue of her identity—of several of her identities—she could make history: as the first female president, the first female and black president, the first Indian-American president. But will that make her candidacy the ideal challenge to Mr Trump’s, or the ideal foil? Already some Republicans are calling her a “DEI hire”, a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Dreams from her mother
Ms Harris’s own campaign book, “The Truths We Hold”, lacks the searching quality of Mr Obama’s or Mr Vance’s. In fact, like most campaign books, it is a bit pedestrian. (Published in 2019, it seems preoccupied with explaining, at a moment the Democratic Party was swinging to the left on law enforcement, why she made her career as a prosecutor.) “One of my mother’s favourite sayings was, ‘Don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are,’” she writes. But, in her presidential bid and her three years as vice-president, she never really did that.
Ms Harris chose “Pioneer” as her Secret Service code name and, in explaining or defending herself, has at times fallen back on describing her path-breaking and the resistance it can provoke. Such arguments, though fair, are better left to others. As Hillary Clinton showed in 2016, “I’m with her,” flattering as it is to a history-making candidate, is the wrong way to say “She’s for us.”
So far, as the presumptive nominee, Ms Harris has wisely taken a page from Mr Obama and reintroduced herself by emphasising not her identity but her experience as a prosecutor, the issues she is running on and her ambitions for the whole country, rather than any group. Americans may no longer be ripe for Mr Obama’s summons to a transcendent unity, but they are clearly uneasy with Mr Trump’s zero-sum politics. Maybe a black Indian-American woman, the daughter of immigrants and wife of a white Jew, can affirm instead what voters know from their own lives, that people are too interesting to be reduced to dumb political stereotypes.■
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