It Wasn’t Supposed to End This Way (For Her)

The progressive moment is well and truly over, and it went out with a cackle.

One of the mysteries of 2024 is how Kamala Harris can seem so competent in one context and utterly lost in another.

When it comes to thumping her bona fides as a San Francisco prosecutor, Harris sounded confident, even polished. Put her in a discussion about everyday issues with—shudder—normal Americans, though, and she’d melt into a puddle of platitude goo. Over and over again. Seemingly no amount of preparation could prepare her for the daunting questions of the 2024 campaign trail: How will you reduce inflation? Why open the southern border? Why will the next four years of Harris look different from the last four?

Some people chalk it up to intelligence. “She’s got the IQ of a fence post,” Mel Gibson quipped in October.

But fence posts don’t end up a single heartbeat from leader of the free world, or have as parents a Stanford economist and biomedical scientist.

Here’s a better explanation: Kamala Harris is in over her head because she should’ve been central committee chair for the Napa County Democratic Party all along, not the presidential pick for the world’s oldest political party. Let this California expat explain.

Failing Up

One-party dictatorships don’t promote for merit, but favoritism. Whether it’s Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, or Communist China, success comes from collecting IOUs. Ruthlessly exploiting blackmail, sexual favors, embarrassing secrets, and bulletproof rolodexes is all part of the game, while the winners knows that hard work and public service are for rubes.

Meet San Francisco, the Kremlin of the California Democratic Party, and its most successful graduate: Kamala Harris.

Kamala infamously began her political ascent as the 29-year-old paramour of the most powerful man in California politics: Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, 31 years her senior (and married), who lavished her with trips to Paris and even a BMW. His election machine was the boost her mediocre career in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office needed to claw above the political jungle—and it worked.

Brown appointed Harris to two well-paid state commissions and, as San Francisco Mayor, endorsed her 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney against the incumbent Democrat DA, Terence Hallinan, who was busy prosecuting Brown’s friends and donors. Those cases were suddenly and inexplicably dropped or pleaded out with light sentences once Harris took office.

As DA, San Francisco’s murder rate exploded and her office was dogged by scandal and unending due process violations. None of that mattered; what did was exploiting identity politics to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for California Attorney General in 2010 by ticking the right boxes: First woman, first Indian-American, and first African-American.

In California, the only election that matters is the Democratic Party primary. Win that, and you practically win the general by default.

Again, Kamala proved a disaster. As AG, she ordered investigators to invade the home of a Planned Parenthood whistleblower, David Daleiden, who’d recorded the organization selling baby body parts in 2015. Harris blocked additional tapes from being released to the public and prosecuted the undercover pro-life activist for violating the state’s Invasion of Privacy Act.

Grim, true. But all that mattered was that Kamala waited her turn by waiting out two terms as Attorney General before running for California’s open U.S. Senate seat in 2016, batting away a meager primary challenge from an Orange County pro-business Democrat and easily winning office.

In Washington, Harris managed to become simultaneously the most radical and unaccomplished member of the Senate, co-sponsoring the Green New Deal to abolish the U.S. economy and sponsoring LGBT legislation to end religious freedom altogether.

Just three years later she was out for promotion, eyeing the Oval Office itself. This time, though, she failed to woo the national race’s own Willie Brown: Former President Barack Obama, who orchestrated Joe Biden’s limp to the finish line from the shadows.

In typical Kamala fashion, her spectacularly bad 2019 presidential campaign fell apart before the year was up and garnered zero votes. Yet two years later, she was in the White House—selected by Democratic Party elites who’d vowed to choose a black woman to loom behind Joe Biden for the next four years (qualified candidates need not apply).

What followed was the most brazen and shameless political stunt in American history: the mid-summer coup against sitting President Joe Biden by the same insiders who put him in office. In just 24 days, this cabal recast Biden from bold President to old “resident” who was somehow fit to remain commander-in-chief today but not on Inauguration Day, 6 months later.

When conservatives heard their justification—“saving” democracy from the “far Right”—most mocked the media’s absurd portrayal of Republicans as small government, liberty-loving “Nazis” who want nothing more than to be left alone by Uncle Sam. What they didn’t appreciate was how literal the Left was being: Not the rule of the demos, the American people, but the rule of tyrannical Democrats was under threat. They were right.

Standing ready to serve as the face for this shadow oligarchy was Kamala Harris, who bragged about her friend Joe’s astounding cognitive agility even as she sealed the casket on his 50-year political career with that signature cackle. And she did it without any vetting, any support, or any real experience earned from her party’s own voters. For Kamala, the Biden coup was the ultimate con; the plastic, made-in-China capstone to an imitation career par excellence.

But it worked. “Progressives” celebrated as they exchanged one manufactured hero for another. Left unmentioned was the stunning fact that the Democrats had fundamentally transformed into something unrecognizable in our country. No longer would their party be directed by a genuine leader—a Bill Clinton, Woodrow Wilson, or Andrew Jackson—but by a puppet, a cereal box mascot, a front man not expected to actually run anything.

It’s just as incredible that they gambled the fate of their Democracy on such an unproven candidate. Coronations don’t prepare politicians for battle. Dodging media interviews, even with friendly outlets lobbing softballs, won’t tone rhetorical muscles. Like an overprotected toddler, Harris was shielded from the consequences of failure her entire public life—so she never learned the crucial lessons that would make her a sharper nominee.

You almost can’t blame her handlers for missing this. At every rung on the career ladder, Kamala Harris failed… but she failed up. It’s obvious in hindsight: She’s always relied on nepotism. In one-party California, that meant ignoring normal voters to impress powerful elites and woo ultraliberal activists, perhaps Kamala Harris’s only talent.

It’s why she’s so at home talking to West Coast granola Marxists, Tinsel Town celebs, and champagne-sipping Maoists who reward fealty to the “progressive” canon, yet she can’t complete a sentence in Wisconsin. She isn’t dumb; she’s the terminal creation of the “progressive” movement, fine-tuned by the Bay Area bourgeoisie and fit for nowhere else.

And that proved her downfall on the campaign trail, when she had to emerge from the liberal swamp to jaw with everyday people… and utterly flopped.

It Wasn’t Supposed to End This Way

Like a fish out of water, Kamala Harris proved completely out of her depth. Her agitated behavior on the campaign trail screamed, “How did I get here?”

That should’ve been obvious beforehand to the people who picked her. So why’d they bet the farm on Harris? There are a number of good answers involving female voters, the 60-year-old’s presentability, and campaign finance arcana. But in all likelihood, they probably wagered that it just didn’t matter who they stuck at the top of the ticket because the Democratic Party’s get-out-the-vote machine would deliver victory—even if they nominated a moldy banana peel.

That isn’t as much of an exaggeration as you might think. For nearly 15 years, the Left has spent billions of dollars developing an election machine designed to deliver the maximum number of Democrat votes regardless of the nominee. Some elections are won on issues, others on personalities. 2020 was won with microtargeting and mass voter mobilization. It’s Tammany Hall run by Henry Ford—or maybe Joseph Stalin—and it was supposed to manufacture a smashing win in 2024.

But the Left miscalculated.

If the Left’s get-out-the-vote machine was the feared dreadnought of American politics, Donald J. Trump proved the plucky, orange torpedo that the strategists missed at their peril. It turns out that good ideas and personalities do matter, and Harris has neither, while Trump’s can’t be avoided. He transformed the stodgy GOP into a majority party with a divine mission to save the republic and restore the American Way. His leadership, if imperfect and controversial at times, nonetheless inspired tens of millions of Americans to believe they could win if only they fought for what’s good, true, and beautiful—including this writer.

Trump’s promise was and remains remarkably simple: “With me, America, you have a future.”

And astoundingly, his enemies in the Democrat leadership obliged—transforming from Barack Obama’s “party of change” to the crusty defenders of the status quo practically overnight, and without thinking through the ramifications.

It soon brought out the worst in the Left for all to see. The party of Roosevelt and Kennedy became bitter and deranged under the rule of hard-left activists. The woke mob became obsessed with purifying its party of anyone who believes men aren’t women, America isn’t irredeemably racist, borders aren’t evil, or any other idea held before the last faculty meeting of U.C. Berkeley’s sociology department. No one can survive that witch hunt. So millions fled.

They found a Republican Party waiting to accept them with open minds and open arms. While the Democratic Party has committed suicide by driving away normal people, the GOP has spent a decade building a new consensus fit to govern deep into the 21st century.

The old, ossified GOP couldn’t have done that. Yet that’s the party which Democrat strategists built their get-out-the-vote machine to permanently crush. What those strategists didn’t plan for in 2010, when their project began, was a once-in-a-century leader like Trump uniting a massive coalition of the anti-Left to sweep away the Marxists for good—and end the raging culture war.

It’s happened before in 1980, 1945, 1865, and 1783, and even further back in Anglo-American history. It’s bound to happen again, and soon. Mark 2024 as the great turning point and the end of the “progressive” moment. It isn’t coming back.

As for Kamala Harris, it’s fitting that she should serve as the figurehead for the radical Left’s sinking ship. It’s how the Democratic Party ought to be remembered: Lost, divided, and raging to the very end. But we shouldn’t dwell too much on its passing; Americans have places to be.

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