Politics
Can Harris Bridge the Great Divide?
The street is not with the vice president.
CHICAGO—The former President Donald Trump’s seeming desire over the past few weeks to hand the election to Vice President Kamala Harris has understandably obscured a number of very real divisions that still plague the Democratic Party at the start of its convention week in Chicago. The question that ought to haunt the dreams of Democratic partisans and their friends in the media is whether Harris can (or even wants to) bridge the great divide between the street, as exemplified by the protests taking place outside the convention, and the party establishment.
The first and most important split between progressive activists and the vast majority of the Democratic delegates has to do with the matter of the administration’s slavish deference toward Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime. The specter of tens of thousands of antiwar protesters descending on the streets of Chicago did little to dissuade President Joe Biden and his Secretary of State Antony Blinken from approving, only last week, $20 billion dollars in arms sales to Tel Aviv. The package includes, among other niceties, 50 F‑15IA and F‑15I fighter jets, 37,739 120mm tank rounds and 50,000 120mm mortar rounds. All of which, if nothing else, brings to mind the philosopher Simone Weil’s observation that “evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.”
As of now, the party establishment seems bound and determined to ignore the demands of the street. Harris herself was fairly explicit on that point only last week when confronted at a speech in Michigan were antiwar activists interrupted her speech by chanting, “We won’t vote for genocide.” Harris’s response was nothing if not cavalier: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
And this seems to be the general attitude of the Democratic establishment toward those who are dissenting from the program: so desperate are they to win, they will, as Weil once observed, excuse just about anything.
The longt …