May You Live in Ordinary Times

The Case for Kamala Harris

Meh. But in a good way.

I have just completed a long and detailed case against Donald Trump as president of the United States—or really for any position of authority in the government.

This implies a vote this Tuesday in favor of Kamala Harris.

You could, of course, abstain. I have a few friends who can’t stand Trump but can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat. They do not live in swing states, so I have not bothered to subject them to a struggle session over this. But if you do live in a swing state, I urge you not to stay home and remain above it all. I just spent a long time detailing the severe negative consequences that are likely to follow from a Trump victory. I’ll repeat just three: Trump has been threatening to revoke broadcast licenses of television networks that displease him, so it is likely he would attempt to curtail freedom of speech. He is also likely to attempt to cut a deal with Vladimir Putin that will undermine Ukraine and reward dictators for territorial aggression. Last but certainly not least, his plan for tariffs and mass deportations would inflict massive damage on the economy.

Not voting implies that you are indifferent to these outcomes, or at least that you are content to let other people decide them. I don’t like to take that approach in life—to let other people decide things for me. I will be voting for Harris tomorrow. I don’t have any reason to think my vote in Virginia will tip the result one way or another, so I am doing this primarily for my own peace of mind, to be able to say I did everything possible to register my objection to Trump.

No, I did not have this attitude in 2016, when I knowingly threw away my vote on a third-party protest candidate, or even in 2020 when I very reluctantly voted for Biden. But January 6, 2021, radicalized me against Trump. I’m strict about that sort of thing. Just one little coup attempt, and you’re out.

May You Live in Ordinary Times

This approach assumes, however, that Kamala Harris would not preside over a disaster of equal magnitude. I don’t think I should have to work very hard to address that concern. If Harris were advocating things as dangerous as Trump, you would know about it. And if you think she is, you are probably hearing it from unreliable partisan sources.

I’ll address a few of those in passing.

Would Harris abandon support for Israel? You might not know this unless you follow a few left-of-center news sources, but pro-Palestinian protesters regularly show up to heckle Harris’s campaign events because they think she is too pro-Israel. They also tried to protest the Democratic convention this summer. Harris has stuck close to Joe Biden’s approach. He raises humanitarian concerns about Gaza and makes fruitless attempts to broker a deal to release the Israeli hostages—but he has not cut off aid to Israel, and he takes the heat for it from the left.

Would Harris “pack the courts”? The Biden proposal for Supreme Court reform, which Harris has backed, would change Supreme Court appointments from a lifetime appointment to a single 18-year term—three Senate terms, or four and a half presidential terms. In theory, it’s a reasonable idea and has some benefits without obviously sacrificing judicial independence. But it would require a constitutional amendment that is vanishingly unlikely to pass for the very reason Democrats want it. The status quo currently favors one side, Republicans, so they have no incentive to support any change.

Harris’s worst economic ideas, one of which I have already critiqued, are an anti-“price-gouging” law and a tax on unrealized capital gains, which is red meat for the economic populists but a very dumb idea (which it seems she has quietly abandoned). Both of these require congressional approval, and Harris is extremely unlikely to have enough support to implement them. I have criticized Harris in the past, back when she was trying to run to the left in the primaries, for wanting to bypass Congress and impose some of her agenda by executive order. She is not proposing that now.

Someone raised a claim that Harris would impose censorship of “misinformation” and a ban on “hate speech.” But the only recent court case on misinformation was thrown out by the Supreme Court—one of the few recent rulings I agreed with—because the plaintiffs couldn’t demonstrate they had actually been affected by government action. There is no pending legislation proposing to ban hate speech, and there hasn’t been for years. (The closest thing was a bill backed by House Republicans to clamp down on campus antisemitism.)

I could go on, but you get the idea. In the comments field, hit me with your best shots on why I should panic about Kamala Harris.

The upshot is that the main case for Kamala Harris is that she is not Donald Trump and does not pose the kind of threats that he does. Harris is an ordinary politician who is wrong in ordinary ways and can be opposed in ordinary ways. I would much rather take my chances with that than with another Trump term.

To reverse the old curse, may we live in ordinary times.

I am quite comfortable voting for candidates I don’t like. I’ve done it in every election I can remember. I don’t hate Harris, but I don’t love her, and I have easily swatted away attempts by friends on the center-left to rope me into being enthusiastic. I can get enthusiastic about causes—but I’ve been around long enough to avoid getting enthusiastic about individual politicians.

But is there a positive case for Harris? Are there things she would do that deserve positive support, causes we can get enthusiastic about? I can think of three things.

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Waiting for the Surge

All evidence indicates that Harris will continue American support for Ukraine. There is no chance she will try to cut off existing funding, as Trump has already attempted to do, and she has repeatedly said that any peace negotiations will be led by Ukraine, not carried out directly between our president and Vladimir Putin.

The Biden administration has not done enough to support Ukraine. We have given them just enough aid to not lose, but not enough to win. We need to ramp up our efforts in a crash program to provide more ammunition and supplies. We should also lift most restrictions on the use of our weapons, and we should see what we can do to warn off North Korea from sending troops.

I don’t know if Harris will be more vigorous than Biden in pursuing this war. She will certainly have a strong incentive to do so, particularly before she runs for re-election in 2028. But I can say there is no realistic chance any of this will happen under Trump.

I feel about Ukraine the way I felt about Iraq in the 2004 election. With John Kerry, the most likely result was an ignominious withdrawal, but with George W. Bush, there was a chance we could turn around our policy and change the course of the war—which eventually happened with the “surge.” I’m making the same calculation here.

With Harris, there is no chance of an immediate surrender to Putin and some chance of a much-needed “surge” in future support for Ukraine.

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The YIMBY Candidate

The one really compelling reason to support Harris is her embrace of the YIMBY agenda—her stated goal to enable the construction of three million new homes in order to ease the housing famine. I have reservations about some aspects of how she will implement this. But this is the first time in a long time I have heard Democrats talking about reducing regulations.

My reservation is that Harris is proposing a mix of reduced regulations and increased tax credits to subsidize home-buying. If she gets the tax credits but not the regulatory reform, she will make our existing policy—subsidize demand while restricting supply—even worse. But there is no way she can get anywhere near her target of three million new homes without lifting those restrictions, so Democrats will have a powerful incentive to follow through.

I am relatively optimistic about these reforms because they are not just a talking point grabbed at random by the Harris campaign. As I have chronicled for a few years now, there is a whole movement on the center-left to combat the stagnation caused by intrusive regulation. That includes a groundswell—partly endorsed by the Biden administration—for reform of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a notorious 1970 law that is blamed for creating so much paperwork that that no large project can get built any more.

What makes these policies so interesting is that they would be the first major reforms of the Democratic Party agenda in a long time. It is the sort of thing that can change what the party stands for and make it more friendly to market—at least for the mainstream of the party.

There is some historical precedent for this. Bill Clinton signed off on free trade and welfare reform in the 1990s, and while we associate the military buildup and deregulation of the 1980s with Ronald Reagan, some of it had its beginnings in Congress in the late 1970s, with the support of centrist Democrats. There is a serious possibility we could get some kind of regulatory reform under a Harris administration.

Similarly, you may have noticed that Harris has been referring to Trump’s proposed tariffs as a tax on consumers, which is absolutely correct. Joe Biden is an old-fashioned Democrats from the era when establishment Democrats embraced protectionism to appease the labor unions, which is why he has not reduced Trump’s first-term tariffs. But in picking up a free-marketers’ talking point, it is very possible that Harris will try to move her party back toward free trade. It would be proof that negative partisanship can occasionally accomplish something good.

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The Virtues of the Establishment

You might note that I talk here about the mainstream of the Democratic Party, and what has struck me in the past few months is the extent to which Harris has become the candidate of the Democratic establishment—and how strong that establishment is. They managed to get Joe Biden to step down, and they managed to rally the whole party around Harris within a week. If the Republican Party establishment had been anywhere near as able to defend itself in the past few years, the world would be a much better place.

The turning point for me was Kamala Harris’s performance in her one and only debate with Donald Trump. In marked contrast to Trump, she came across as articulate, well-informed, moderate, and above all disciplined. Between Trump and Biden, I think we’ve almost forgotten what that looks like in a candidate. Yes, she still flubs an answer every now and again. But compared to the baseline for Donald Trump—his incoherent “weave” of rambling digressions—she looks like a genius.

What Harris offers are the virtues of the establishment in contrast to the populist. While the populist trades in incoherent anger, the establishment cultivates a level of basic competence and the ability to be well-informed and in contact with the facts. The establishment offers a better method of thinking, on the whole, than that of the incoherent populist.

I’m not going to oversell this. Harris will still lie and pander and adopt some ill-thought-out policies. Politicians are carefully selected for these behaviors—and selected for them by us, the voters—so we have to grade them on a curve. In contrast to her opponent, Harris has these vices in normal quantities, with some counterbalancing virtues.

I return to the point where I began. Harris is an ordinary politician who is wrong in ordinary ways and can be opposed and supported, as merited, in ordinary ways.

A vote for Harris is a vote to live in ordinary times.