What Harris Needs to Say to Defeat Trump
“The presidential contest is not between Trump and Harris,” Nicholas Powers writes in our August cover story. “It’s between Harris the Centrist and Harris the Populist.”
Tonight, we’ll find out which one shows up as tens of millions of Americans tune in to watch what is likely to be the only presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
Will it be the Harris who has vowed to take on price-gouging corporations and landlords, defend labor unions, increase the minimum wage and expand the care economy? Or will it be the Harris whose August surge in the polls has stalled as she continues to speak in mostly vague generalities when she’s not flip-flopping on past stances she’s taken?
“Run on identity, abortion and democracy, and we get a coin flip election between a narrow victory or loss,” Powers adds. “Run on a working-class program, and she hits the jackpot.”
Note: We’ll be talking about tonight’s presidential debate and much more on today’s Indypendent News Hour which will air today from 5-6 pm on WBAI-99.5 FM and streaming on wbai.org.
Harris’ Path to Victory Requires a Message That Speaks to the Concerns of America’s Multi-Racial Working Class
Kamala Harris can kick Trump’s ass. Like devastate him. Imagine she’s Chun Li from Street Fighter and does a spinning bird kick. She’ll say, “He’s a felon. He’ll sign a national abortion ban. He’ll give tax breaks to the rich.” The hits make Trump woozy. Stars circle his head. Wham!
But there’s a catch. She can’t campaign as a centrist Democrat, waving her identity as a Black woman to sell reformist policy. She can’t repeat Obama or Hillary. To win and win big, Harris has to campaign like Bernie Sanders.
Why? To get older, white, working-class voters who feel betrayed onto her side. To win over non-voters who see the system as rigged. Why? The goal is larger than winning the election. The goal is to stop the rise of fascism. Choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate is a good start. But Harris has to go further and champion Bernie’s economic populism.
Trump and the Republicans will hurl every racist and sexist label at Harris. “America” being what it is, they’ll stick. Harris represents a racially diverse, metropolitan future that scares some working-class whites and alienated men. She has to define herself as their ally not their enemy.
The question is not whether Harris can win. She can. Run on identity, abortion and democracy, and we get a coin-flip election between a narrow victory or loss. Run on a working-class program, and she hits the jackpot.
The contest is not between Trump and Harris. It’s between Harris the Centrist and Harris the Populist.
Nail-biting to November
We’re at the crossroads. You can feel it. The air is electric. Will the nation vote for Trump? Will his grip on us tighten like a murderer’s hands? If so, expect a national abortion ban. Expect even more violent policing of peaceful protests. And an all-out assault on unions.
Or will the nation vote for the first Black woman president? Will progressives have some breathing space to organize and protest? Will we be able to put pressure on President Harris to stop sending Israel weapons that slaughter Palestinians? Will we be able to push for national healthcare, a Green New Deal and full abortion rights?
It’s a nail-biter until November. Yes, Democrats are flawed and hypocritical. Party leaders gaslit voters for years about Biden’s declining health. We should have had a real primary. We needed to test the new upcomers. But right here, right now, the Democrats are the vehicle for maintaining a semblance of democracy within which civil society can push for justice.
The path to victory is through a series of obstacles. The United States has a population of 342 million; 239 million are eligible voters, and 159 million votes were cast in 2020. In that last election, the lines wove around city blocks. Panic was in the air. “Not this guy again. Not another four years of crazy.” Trump got 74 million, and Biden got 81 million. I heard the news that Biden won at my Brooklyn playground. All the parents cheered.
Yet outside of our cheers were nearly 80 million Americans who did not vote. The way to protect democracy from MAGA Republicans is to wake the sleeping giant of non-voters. They are often poorer, younger and less educated than those who vote.
Nearly 53 million people in the United States work low-paying jobs. Every day they walk the cliff edge of poverty. They look at stacks of unpaid bills and sleep in cars or on friend’s couches. They lose homes and jobs. Nothing they hear from Democrats or Republicans speaks to their needs.
The next obstacle is the Electoral College, which skews elections in favor of Republicans. Democrats are packed in a few big states like California and New York where they run up lopsided victories. Republican voters are more spread out, which means your average swing state voter is to the right of the average voter nationwide. Even if a majority votes for the Democrats, like in 2020 when Biden beat Trump by more than seven million votes, they can still lose. In that election, Biden barely squeaked out an Electoral College victory. If just 43,000 voters had not pulled the lever for “Scranton Joe” in Wisconsin, Michigan and Arizona, we’d be in a second Trump term — just 43,000!
For Harris to win, she has to wring votes from both the Rust Belt and Sun Belt swing states like Georgia and Arizona. She has to get non-voters and older,white, working-class voters to roll the dice on her. She has to show up at soup kitchens and talk with workers on food stamps. She has to out-Bernie Bernie. She has to campaign on Build Back Better, Biden’s signature program for helping working families that was blocked by Congress in 2021, and she has to say, “Now we can get it done!”
Harris faces another big obstacle: the story that white voters have of Black people. Already, Republicans are tapping into racist and sexist tropes. Behind “she’s not smart” is the Coon image. Behind she’s a “dangerous radical” is the Nat Turner caricature.
Democrats and Republicans harvest data from what we buy, what we click on and where we live in order to create a granular map of voters. Yet under that data, under the A.I. tracking, is an older history. It guides us like sleepwalkers following a map with our eyes closed. Written on it is centuries of racism.
The Black Image in the Racist Mind
“What the hell have you done,” J.D. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee,shouted about Kamala Harris to a stadium full of MAGA supporters, “except collect a government check for the past 20 years?!” Did you hear it? Government check. She’s a “lazy” Black. Harris is a glorified welfare queen.
Interviewed by CNN, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), called Harris a “D.E.I. hire.” MSNBC interviewed white Republican women. One said of Harris, “I think she’s an idiot.” Another said, “She’s not real smart. That’s my opinion.” Hear it, now? Dumb coon.
Republicans tap into anti-Black stereotypes to spark disgust in the lizard part of the white brain. They can because racism is baked into our culture. It is how slavery was justified. How else can one clamp chains on people and sell them? You can’t think they’re human. That’s how power works.
Arising from the economic base of slavery, white-supremacist ideology cast Africans as animals. From the “founding fathers” to white overseers, racism churned like a toxic river. Thomas Jefferson believed in it. The master in Frederick Douglass’ memoir breathed it like air. Imagine him, holding money, looking at a human being shivering on an auction block and not feeling empathy because it was in his material interest to see an animal. That’s ideology.
Antebellum slave owners circulated images of happy Blacks. They talked ofUncle Tom, an older desexualized Black man who worked in-house. They praised Mammy, a big, handkerchief-wearing Black woman minding the master’s children. Next up was Sambo, a happy, bumbling servant. They were “good” Blacks. The false imagery was used to show that white supremacy was right by nature and God.
As the smoke of the Civil War cleared and Southern plantations lay in ruins, racists reacted to freed Black people by transforming the imagery from “good Blacks” to “bad Blacks” who endangered decent society with their animalism. The“brute” was a fearsome, Black man who lusted for white women. The “jezebel” was a hypersexual Black woman who seduced decent men. The “coon” was a lazy, shiftless and disobedient Black man.“Picaninnies” were nappy, wild Black children who had reverted to a native state.
The equation is simple. When white supremacists are in power, they promote the image of “good Blacks.” See how well the system works?! When scared of losing power, they suddenly see “bad Blacks” everywhere.
U.S. politicians have recycled racist imagery, Republicans especially — I mean, Jesus, they chew on it like a dog with a bone. Why? The Republican Partyserves a free-market business elite that wants power but has no natural voting base for its goal of hoarding wealth. Since the late 1960s, its leaders have stoked the racial and cultural grievances of working- and middle-class whites. In their ideology, God-fearing whites must protect America from perverts, minorities and communists. The go-to villains were the Brute and Coon, updated as urban criminals and undeserving poor. Just listen to Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist for Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., who said, “You start out in 1954 by saying, nigger, nigger, nigger,” he breezily said. “By 1968 you can’t say nigger. So, you say forced busing, states’ rights. You’re getting so abstract now that you’re talking about cutting taxes.”
Need evidence? Running for president in 1976, Reagan hammered the story of aWelfare Queen, who he said, “…has 80 names, 30 addresses…her tax-free income is alone is over $150,000.” Do you hear it? Lazy Coon. Think of Bush Sr.’s infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad that featured a Black male rapist. Pure Brute. In 2012, Pat Buchanan said, “Obama is the drug dealer of welfare”. Urban Coon. Think House Leader Paul Ryan in 2014 saying, “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working.” Coons again.
Democrats also tapped into anti-Black imagery. In the 90’s, Hillary Clinton railed against “super-predators” while her husband, President Bill Clinton, signed a crime bill that sent mass incarceration soaring.
However, liberals usually eschew “Bad Black” imagery for the“Good Black” from the Antebellum Era’s Uncle Tom but updated into the Magic Negro! You’ve seen the Magic Negro a million times. He heals white people, fixes their problems or gives absolution. Ever see The Green Mile? Or The Legend of Bagger Vance? Remember The Matrix? Unlike the Uncle Tom, the Magic Negro serves white people but keeps his dignity and independence to make the service more innocent. How does this show up in politics? Well, Obama was the Magic Negro of Liberals.
Back to Republicans. In 2022, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) ran an hysterical attack ad against his challenger,Mandela Barnes, a Black Democrat. It showed crime headlines and a woman’s scared voice said, “That’s Mandela Barnes. He’s talking about releasing violent criminals…into our communities…murderers and child rapists.” Not child rapists! Can you see? It is a 21st century Willie Horton ad. Liberals will let the Brutes out! (Sing that to Who Let the Dogs Out by Baha Men)
History is not without a sense of irony. The Republican playbook will be used on Republicans. Harris was a prosecutor. She can take their law-and-order rhetoric and throw it back at Trump, a felon, and the January 6th insurrectionists. The whole Proud Boys/Neo-Nazi/QAnon craziness has transformed MAGA in the eyes of many voters from “Good Whites” to “Bad Whites”. Democrats can now show that Republicans have become the villains of their own playbook. They are now “White Brutes”.
From Copmala to the Queen of the Dream
Buzz. I checked my phone. A text came in with an over-the-top image of then Senator Kamala Harris as a super-cop. In it, she has a test-me-motherfucker police stare. In the background, she cackles while arresting a Black girl, handcuffing wrists as thin as matchsticks. I shook my head. My Black Lives Matters friends had a sharp reaction to her. She’s a cop. She’s down with mass incarceration. She is “The Man”.
That was in 2020. Now, Harris’s record as a prosecutor is a source of pride. A crown of destiny is being placed on Harris. Black women, Black men, LGBTQ+ folks and white women, among others, are hosting Zoom calls and throwing money like a cash grab air tube. She is seen as Obama 2.0. Another first. Another win for M.L.K.’s Dream.
How is this transformation happening? Well, if Republicans have a Birth of Nation story where they are the vigilantes using violence to protect a natural order, Black America has its own deep story, based in the Bible.
We are a people exiled in the Promised Land. Malcolm X said we are “lost in the wilderness of North America,” freed from slavery but hounded by our enemies as we search for home. Harriet Tubman and King were two Moses figures. Malcolm X our John the Baptist. Obama our Joshua, redeeming the Dream. Now Kamala is the new Queen, a New Redeemer.
But every hero casts a shadow. For every Malcolm X there’s a poverty pimp. For every Coretta Scott King there’s MAGA hype-women like Diamond and Silk. Between those poles are leaders who work the system but aren’t down for revolution. We honor Roy Wilkins and Ella Baker. We honor A. Philip Randolph and BLM founders Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi. We need leaders to work the system from within. The danger is the system can work you.
It can turn you inside out and pit you against the people you claim to serve.
And we have been betrayed. We’ve seen “leaders” take the money and run. Our ancestors gave us a measuring tape to use; it goes from sell-out to savior. To be honest, in 2020, Harris was seen as closer to the sell-out side. She was a district attorney. She laughed about arresting parents who let kids be truant from school. She grudgingly came out in support for Medicare-For-All. She came off as more ambitious than visionary. She never got our support. Not really.
Now that she is the Democratic candidate for president, we are bathing her in love. We transfer our hope and fear, our history on to her. It fuels her ascent from quasi-sell out to the Queen of the Dream.
The reality is more ambiguous.
Harris is a child of the Civil Rights Movement and the decolonial movements sweeping the globe in that era. Her mother, an Indian cancer researcher, and her father, a leftwing Jamaican economist, met and fell in love while at Berkeley in the 1960s. Kamala went to her first protests in a baby stroller. She spent summers in Jamaica. She visited India. She learned about the world and its dangers. As a teen, her family took in a sexually abused friend. Maybe it taught Harris to never be vulnerable. Maybe that’s why she always finds the angle; she deftly dodges obstacles to get higher positions of power.
Like Obama, Harris eschewed her parents’ 1960s idealism for hard-nosed pragmatism. She did the law school thing and leveled up as a prosecutor, then a San Francisco District Attorney in order to “change the system” from within. Harris is a highly intelligent woman who carefully triangulates. She takes liberal positions but keeps her support from the elite. On her watch, the D.A.’s office convicted people for marijuana possession. Yet few went to prison for it. Yes, she drove an anti-truancy program that snagged a few parents. Yet the reality is the street was a conveyor belt to crime. The kids had to be in school. She did not enforce Proposition 8, a 2008 voter initiative in California that banned gay marriage. When you trace the dots, a portrait emerges. Harris is a pragmatic liberal who knew that the first step in protecting the vulnerable was getting power and keeping it. Even if that means sacrificing progressive idealsfor popular support.
Harris is a liberal. She supports abortion rights, affirmative action and LGBTQ rights. In the Senate, she pushed for six-month paid family leave so parents can bond with their baby. At the same time, she has long been friendly with Silicon Valley – her brother-in-law and top advisor Tony West is the chief legal officer at Uber – and many of her former aides have gone onto lucrative corporate lobbying gigs. They might pop in a Harris administration asking for corporate favors. Her official campaign website doesn’t mention her position on a single issue.
Harris is not the “Left Wing Lunatic” Republicans see. Nor is she the “Queen of the Dream” that Democrats hallucinate. Yet the sight of the first Black woman president will have a powerful effect. It means a Black girl, maybe Afro-Latina in the Bronx, maybe a Black girl alone in a white neighborhood in Illinois, or a Haitian woman crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, sees Harris in the White House and knows she can be powerful too. Not just powerful but can bring her long journey to tell the world; the running from gangs, the endless night work, the mopping floors and breathing chemicals, the glass ceiling at work, the false dreams sold everywhere, the men lying to her, the men hurting her, the healing that took too long. All of it.
Harris has become a symbol and it has eclipsed her messy humanity. Symbols can be a North Star for a new generation. A Black girl whose name no one knows, sees it and when she arrives, so does the future we need.
The View from the Left
Who wins the election depends on which Harris shows up. At this point, it’s not about Trump anymore. Trump is Trump. He’s an aging alpha ape, making fascist word salads on live TV. He hates losing, especially to Black women. The more he falls in the polls, the crazier he’ll get. Watch for the doom-spiral.
If Harris the Centrist shows up, we might lose. If she doubles-down on identity, she’ll lose. The greatest risk to her campaign is if she becomes a symbol to the older white working class of the multi-cultural, late stage capitalism that left them behind. They don’t believe they have a home in the future with its fluid identities. Fluid language and capital. Fluid technology. Fluid pronouns. Fluid fashions and music. Fluid diets. Fluid moralities from polyamory to New Age woo-woo. Fluid West Coast and East Coast cities whose elites look down from jet windows at those stuck in small towns.
If Harris the Populist champions something like a revived Build Back Better or a Green New Deal combined with a law-and-order campaign against Trump and company; it’s a done deal. The millions of new jobs would anchor Americans spinning in the vortex of capitalism. The wages would give self-worth. The pride in seeing new wind turbines and new electric cars, would transform the worldview of a generation. Dangling that vision in front of white working class in the swing states can peel enough of them away from Trump to win big.
Economic populism restores order for those on the edge of poverty. Which means a Harris campaign has to be creative. She can’t let herself be defined as the “Bad Black”, the “Left Wing Lunatic” by Republicans. It also can’t let her be defined as the “Good Black” by liberals, who already, are pushing her to be the Magic Negro, the female version of the Uncle Tom, aka the Mammy-Cop, who’ll protect and serve them. An icky version came into view during a Drew Barrymore interview, who leaned way too close to Harris and said, “We need you to be Momala to the country.”
No, we don’t need “Momala”. We need Harris to be what Black women have always been in our families, in our churches, in our neighborhoods…leaders. Kamala the Populist has to fight Kamala the Centrist, who is deep in the back pocket of Wall Street and Silicon Valley billionaires. The mega-rich pour money into her campaign and expect a return on that investment. Already Harris reversed popular liberal positions she took in her 2020 presidential campaign to steer to the dead center. She was against fracking, now she’s for it. She was for single-payer healthcare, now she’s against it. She vowed to raise taxes on the wealthy, now she does not.
The last obstacle to Harris winning is Harris herself. We who want her to win, have to ask, which version is going to show up? And what will we do, when she does?
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