Yascha asks the most persistent question about Kamala, "I think there's two different views -- One is that Kamala Harris has a political core [that is] moderate; The other is that she's never had a political core." So which is it?
I remembered that Kamala had answered that in an interesting way. AI couldn't find it. Stumped, I thought, perhaps I posted that, and Googled my web site. Yup. Here it is:
"What puzzles people about Kamala is whether she’s really a centrist claiming to be progressive, or a progressive working inside the system. When she decided to be a prosecutor, her activist mother questioned her hard about this. And this is her explanation.
She had seen enough of protest politics while growing up — fighting for “justice from the outside,” as she called it. And according to her autobiography “When activists came marching and banging on doors,” she “wanted to be on the other side to let them in.”
I think that’s only half right. I think she is more interested in being on the inside so that she can make smart and progressive policy herself. That’s not so bad. Protest movements are needed to provide political pressure for change. But they need smart, sympathetic politicians on the inside, willing to get their hands dirty to get the job done. That’s how it’s always worked. Martin Luther King Jr. needed LBJ inside making deals. And LBJ wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, done it without MLK on the outside changing public opinion.
You can read the whole post at https://zfacts.com/2020/08/five-reasons-to-cheer-kamala-harris/ (a dormant website, that I'll return to when I finish my book.) I see one mistake: It says I lived 5 blocks from where she lived at the time she was first bused across town. By then I'd moved.
Her autobiography came out in 2019. I don't think we can take anything she may have said there as evidence that she's "really" a progressive trying to work from the inside, because by 2019, anti-police progressivism had already become well-established after a series of high-profile police shootings. It had not been firmly established back in 2007 when she became a prosecutor. So if one posits that Kamala Harris blows with the wind, being a prosecutor in 2007 and then releasing in a 2019 book that she was trying to work from the inside is hardly persuasive. It fits either narrative perfectly.
More on Mounk’s question (see comment below) about Kamala’s politics, which has broad importance, especially in this age of populism.
Let me restate it as follows: Is Kamala (type 1) a strategic radical or (type 2) strategically self-interested? That’s hard to answer because a self-interested person would not claim to be that.
Is there any way to find an answer?
The best guess might come from how someone treats people in their own tribe when they compete with them − say, during a primary. In her first primary debate (end of 2015), her main competitor was Biden. Harris used the following attack.
"There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me"
Her biggest deception was implying that Biden had opposed the type of busing used in Berkeley. That was locally designed and implemented. Biden only opposed federally mandated bussing.
Jim Baker, a former black mayor of Wilmington, Delaware (Biden’s state), said he urged Biden to actively fight the busing plan — even if he had to work with racists.
More ironically, Joe was aligned with the leaders of both the Black Power Movement and critical race theory, while Kamala was on the “wrong side of history,” as they say.
Three days after Stokely Carmichael launched Black Power, he was on “Face the Nation” (June 19, 1966), saying, “In the North, you take the black kids out of the ghettos and bus them to … ‘good’ white schools; that heightens the inferiority process in those children who are left, and that didn't go there. … [Black people] must control their school board. And when they control their school board, they will have good schools. And then you can talk about integration.”
This was likely picked up by Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, who said almost the same thing in what is now considered the first CRT paper.
School bussing in Berkeley started the year Kamala was born, and she finished the first half of first grade in a Montessori school before her mother decided it was safe to save some money and let her bus to an upper-class White School.
My view is that Harris has a whole lot of strategic self-interest mixed in with her strategic radicalism. But I’ll sure be voting for her anyway.
Yascha asks the most persistent question about Kamala, "I think there's two different views -- One is that Kamala Harris has a political core [that is] moderate; The other is that she's never had a political core." So which is it?
I remembered that Kamala had answered that in an interesting way. AI couldn't find it. Stumped, I thought, perhaps I posted that, and Googled my web site. Yup. Here it is:
"What puzzles people about Kamala is whether she’s really a centrist claiming to be progressive, or a progressive working inside the system. When she decided to be a prosecutor, her activist mother questioned her hard about this. And this is her explanation.
She had seen enough of protest politics while growing up — fighting for “justice from the outside,” as she called it. And according to her autobiography “When activists came marching and banging on doors,” she “wanted to be on the other side to let them in.”
I think that’s only half right. I think she is more interested in being on the inside so that she can make smart and progressive policy herself. That’s not so bad. Protest movements are needed to provide political pressure for change. But they need smart, sympathetic politicians on the inside, willing to get their hands dirty to get the job done. That’s how it’s always worked. Martin Luther King Jr. needed LBJ inside making deals. And LBJ wouldn’t have, couldn’t have, done it without MLK on the outside changing public opinion.
You can read the whole post at https://zfacts.com/2020/08/five-reasons-to-cheer-kamala-harris/ (a dormant website, that I'll return to when I finish my book.) I see one mistake: It says I lived 5 blocks from where she lived at the time she was first bused across town. By then I'd moved.
Interesting observation — didn’t know about her disagreement with her mother about becoming a prosecutor!
We know Harris’ answer, but your comment inspired me to look for a way to check it.
Her autobiography came out in 2019. I don't think we can take anything she may have said there as evidence that she's "really" a progressive trying to work from the inside, because by 2019, anti-police progressivism had already become well-established after a series of high-profile police shootings. It had not been firmly established back in 2007 when she became a prosecutor. So if one posits that Kamala Harris blows with the wind, being a prosecutor in 2007 and then releasing in a 2019 book that she was trying to work from the inside is hardly persuasive. It fits either narrative perfectly.
More on Mounk’s question (see comment below) about Kamala’s politics, which has broad importance, especially in this age of populism.
Let me restate it as follows: Is Kamala (type 1) a strategic radical or (type 2) strategically self-interested? That’s hard to answer because a self-interested person would not claim to be that.
Is there any way to find an answer?
The best guess might come from how someone treats people in their own tribe when they compete with them − say, during a primary. In her first primary debate (end of 2015), her main competitor was Biden. Harris used the following attack.
"There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me"
Her biggest deception was implying that Biden had opposed the type of busing used in Berkeley. That was locally designed and implemented. Biden only opposed federally mandated bussing.
Jim Baker, a former black mayor of Wilmington, Delaware (Biden’s state), said he urged Biden to actively fight the busing plan — even if he had to work with racists.
More ironically, Joe was aligned with the leaders of both the Black Power Movement and critical race theory, while Kamala was on the “wrong side of history,” as they say.
Three days after Stokely Carmichael launched Black Power, he was on “Face the Nation” (June 19, 1966), saying, “In the North, you take the black kids out of the ghettos and bus them to … ‘good’ white schools; that heightens the inferiority process in those children who are left, and that didn't go there. … [Black people] must control their school board. And when they control their school board, they will have good schools. And then you can talk about integration.”
This was likely picked up by Derrick Bell, the godfather of CRT, who said almost the same thing in what is now considered the first CRT paper.
School bussing in Berkeley started the year Kamala was born, and she finished the first half of first grade in a Montessori school before her mother decided it was safe to save some money and let her bus to an upper-class White School.
My view is that Harris has a whole lot of strategic self-interest mixed in with her strategic radicalism. But I’ll sure be voting for her anyway.