For two months, the Kamala Harris campaign shrouded her policy worldview in mystery. Now, on the eve of her sole televised debate with Donald Trump, and with the latest New York Times/Siena poll showing the two campaigns tied neck-and-neck nationally and across key battleground states, the Harris campaign site has deigned to publish an issues document, titled “A New Way Forward.”
For those who worried that she would ditch Bidenism’s more economically populist elements, the document bears (mildly) good omens. For those who know that 2024 is the immigration election, and that Harris has been on the wrong side of the issue, “A New Way Forward” offers little hope.
Let’s start with the positive side of the ledger. The document is almost entirely bereft of charged “woke” terminology like “race,” “structural racism,” “equity,” and “gender.” This isn’t the place to relitigate the debate over whether wokeness is on the wane—or whether its precepts have been institutionalized to such a degree that they needn’t be spelled out.
“Identitarianism is, for now, out as a Democratic electoral proposition.”
What matters for our purposes is that the document reflects a former #Defund advocate’s conscious decision not to highlight issues of race, gender, and sexuality, not least by keeping mum about her own identity—even as her opponent speculates about whether she is really black. Clearly, Harris and others in her circle can read the mood among many liberals desperate to leave behind the fever dream of 2020 and 2021. Identitarianism is, for now, out as a Democratic electoral proposition, even if it remains entrenched in elite institutions.
Then there is Harris’s relationship with Bidenism as a populist economic program. As Compact contributor Matt Stoller warned soon after she took President Biden’s place atop the Democratic ticket, there were reasons to worry that Harris was more of a Clinton-style neoliberal, what with LinkedIn founder and party mega-donor Reid Hoffman openly pushing her to drop tariffs against China and to fire Lina Khan, Biden’s crusading antitrust czar; and with her senior team staffed by Obama alumni-turned-Big Tech lobbyists like Karen Dunn and Eric Holder.
Here, the issues document offers a mixed picture. Harris vows to maintain Biden’s pro-union posture and to support the PRO Act, which would restore American workers’ ability to defend their interests collectively. For those worried about Khan’s fate and the nascent neo-Brandeisian movement more generally, the document telegraphs reassurance:
As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers…. And she’ll keep fighting to bring down prescription drug costs by taking on pharmacy middlemen, who raise consumers’ prices for their own gain and squeeze independent pharmacies’ profits.
But the picture on tariffs is less clear. While the document notes that a President Harris wouldn’t “tolerate unfair trade practices from China,” that could easily be interpreted to mean working through toothless World Trade Organization processes, rather than mounting a systematic effort to protect and revive American manufacturing. The word “tariff” is notably absent from the document. This is a worrying sign, given some of the anti-tariff messaging at the Democratic National Convention; and the fact that liberal commentators continue to frame tariffs as a tax on consumers—without noting their historic role in building American productivity and prosperity.
Which brings us, finally, to immigration. In February, Gallup reported that immigration had emerged as the No. 1 issue on the minds of Americans. Since then, concern about surging migrant flows has continued to dominate public debate, and voters for whom it’s the top issue strongly prefer Trump. Given the Biden administration’s disastrously lax approach, which has left even blue mayors and governors at their wit’s end, Harris has to strike a much tougher stance, and even attempt to outflank Trump from the right.
The new issues document tries to do this, but not in any way that is credible. The section on the border is among the shortest, and it merely restates Harris’s support for the “bipartisan border-security bill” that went down in defeat this year—only to be resurrected as a Biden executive order.
The problem with the measure is that it effectively ratifies a huge number of illegal crossings. Under the executive-order version signed by Biden, supposedly more stringent than the defunct bill, the president’s authority to close the border doesn’t kick in unless average daily crossings hit 2,500 over a given period. Put another way: The measure contemplates some 912,000 newcomers entering the homeland each year—without ever triggering the touted presidential response.
That’s an unacceptable number for many voters. It’s also a testament to how the free movement of labor remains the one element of neoliberalism that Democrats are most reluctant to throw out, even under their “post-neoliberal” dispensation.