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Notes -
"The Democrats' new sunny vibes"
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-democrats-new-sunny-vibes
Noah Smith argues that with Kamala Harris and her surge in the polls gave the Democrats more chill and optimistic vibes. Going back to normalcy. The only thing missing is a "It's morning again in America" ad.
Case in point: I read right now the headline that Joe Biden warns about the "bloodbath" Trump allegedly promised if he loses the election. It is like soothing cool aid for /r/politics, but it does sound a bit hollow from a cranky old Biden, doesn't it? I don't think Harris will make the same doom & gloom attack. Maybe there is a bit good cop / bad cop dynamic here.
Regarding her VP pick Tim Walz I read the worst about him here, but looking at pictures of that guy I just don't feel it. He looks harmless and nice. Noah says the record shows that Walz is a pro market Yimby guy who is pro-nuclear. When the biggest problem of America is that it can't build anymore than you want a guy like him at the top. And mirroring the tone change of the Democrats Walz message is not an angry "kill the rich!" like from blue-haired-Antifa-communists, but a pragmatic "help the poor".
Walz may not appeal to social conservatives, but the aim is to appeal to independents/undecided anyway. And he is the sort of guy who both signals that woke is over, because woke won:
"Post-protestant middle-American orthodoxy" is quite mouthful. But it is not quite the professional–managerial class, instead a bit more folksy.
Regarding the lefty fringes, neoliberalism is back on the menu:
Certainly the corporate news media has been spinning wildly in hopes of a Trump defeat.
I have a number of criticisms of Harris, but historically, the most consequential impact of most Presidents has been through Supreme Court nominations. And Harris has always been a "no friends to the right of me, no enemies to the left of me" sort of politician. The independents/undecideds are rarely sufficiently dialed in to understand or care about the intricacies of law and its long-term impact on culture. Justice Jackson has already shown herself to be an unsophisticated jurist who simply votes for whatever seems Wokest, and Harris would appoint more of the same.
The fact that we've reached a point in our political history where every cultural disagreement turns into a Constitutional Question does not really bode well, I think. We are supposed to have a federal system; not every question of importance is supposed to be answered the same way for the entire nation. To the contrary--questions of importance are precisely the questions that states should be free to disagree about. Trump's nominees have moved the needle in the right direction, albeit only slightly. Harris would move us more toward totalitarianism and ruin than Trump could ever hope to manage, assuming she gets an even slightly sympathetic Congress (and I do expect her to win in November, as a direct result of the corporate news media being the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party--the fix is clearly in).
I don't like Trump, I've never liked Trump, and he has been a disaster for the Republican Party. But he was genuinely a kind of bland president who made okay SCOTUS picks. I would expect Harris to be essentially his equal-but-opposite--actually a much more boring President than one might expect from her public buffoonery, but something of a jurisprudential catastrophe in the long run.
I think the biggest concern is that Harris/Walz really don’t seem like a pair who understand that their ideological enemies are allowed to survive and flourish and even win occasionally, and think they need to change the rules if that’s going on.
Like I had problems with Obama’s and Biden’s us-vs-them arc of history triumphalism. But I didn’t get that vibe from them. I don’t think Biden is fully aware that he just endorsed court packing(I mean, I don’t think he’s aware of many other things as well, but like, Obama isn’t notably cheerleading for it, and earlier in Biden’s tenure when he was a hair more lucid he backed away from the idea). Harris, I think just genuinely has a very different idea about what democracy means(namely, the progressive establishment always wins, and the rules ensure that).
Rule by the demos versus rule by the democrats versus rule by demographics.
Would not all be affixed the same grammar?
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