The 21st-century Democratic Party is the party of postmodern politics: Their best candidates, like their “best” policy positions, mime the emptiness of playful signifiers freed from a referential world, indulging in decorative gestures. Within the floating world of simulacral liberalism, they play a game of “progressiveness.” They are for science, the climate, social justice—interchangeable terms that mark them as different from the “fascists” across the aisle, who are allegedly on the side of irrationality, environmental degradation, and oppression. While liberal thought leaders enjoin us not to think in gender binaries, they also encourage us to indulge in all manner of other political binaries.
“In Kamala Harris, postmodern liberals have found the perfect empty signifier.”
In Kamala Harris, postmodern liberals have found the perfect empty signifier. Her special talent lies in tossing word salads that disguise the party’s allegiance to the interests of capital and allow it to continue avoiding the subject of class. Once progressive, sometimes authoritarian, and eminently acquiescent to the demands of any powerful industry, Harris floats through the matrix of signifiers. Just as Hope and Change morphed into Amtrak Joe, both have morphed into whatever we want to imagine of Harris, our first female Blasian candidate, the daughter of an academic and a scientist, a tough prosecutor, a fun-loving sorority sister, a well-educated, sometimes-well-spoken avatar of the Democratic Party’s ever-evolving consensus.