There are various positions an American can take, politically. A woefully incomplete list might begin with the broad categories of far left, moderate left, far right, and moderate right. A relatively savvy observer might add a few intriguing outliers like libertarians, or Christian populists of the left who mix compassion with rigid orthodoxies. (I mention this last example, which some might find a stretch, because I don’t believe there is any left-wing subset that really corresponds to the libertarian phenomenon of the right.) And then, crucially, there are the Independents, who might be categorized as the middle.
All of these categories have their problems, and despite the evidence of stereotypical thinking and behavior that we see all day long on social media and aboveground media (increasingly interrelated) , each one is an oversimplification that can often be unhelpful.
Social media and aboveground media share one unfortunate characteristic, which is that posturing is now the norm. In the aboveground media (I refer to everything from television news to online content creators), it’s become increasingly difficult to survive without pandering to one primary-color psychological demographic or another. And on social media, few people discuss anything with measured tones or nuance. If you do, you will eventually get attacked by someone who is so dedicated to demonizing whatever he or she sees as the other side that your civility looks to them like appeasement of rank evil.
I’ve blathered on in this manner for a specific reason. What I’m here to discuss is the nest of implications surrounding something I wrote on Facebook about senator and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, and I don’t want to immediately cue the ire of anyone who might conclude that I’m obsessing about her specifically. In fact, my views about Ms. Harris are not strongly held or emotional at all. It’s the reactions to her that I feel strongly about, and I think anyone on the left who has opinions about her one way or the other might benefit from my perspective.
I’ve already written about my Kamala-related thinking several times, so I’ll recap with a brevity that isn’t normal for me.
1. I love the idea of our government, at all levels, becoming less white, less male, and less straight.
2. As much as I love this idea, I don’t also love the idea of ignoring my objections to any candidate who represents this shift.
3. Senator Harris has a track record as a prosecutor and attorney general that I find troubling. It’s not a dealbreaker for me, but I also don’t like the idea of ignoring it.
Regardless of my personal views, I’m quite open to hearing information about Harris, regardless of its implications pro or con. As I’ve said, I would be willing and even eager to vote for her if she were the Democratic nominee in 2020.
I learned the other day that my perspective, as laid out above, was not reasonable enough to keep people from confronting me angrily about it.
I was mocked for what one person called “chin-stroking,” which I take to mean a dangerously unproductive focus on trivial aspects of a candidate’s record. Another person offered that he was sick and tired of the left sabotaging its own candidates in this way. He was angry enough to get abusive about it. When I objected to the abusive language, I was accused of being disingenuous by a third person, who suggested that my criticism of the Senator justified anger and abuse from people who liked her.
I addressed all this at boring length already, and I only offer this sunmary as background for the millions who didn’t read what I said about it. But there’s another chapter, which I find significant.
A few days after the initial fracas, and my typically prolix response to it, I read a post by an African-American woman who could be described as an activist, and a highly educated one. Her focus is issues and ideas related to African-Americans. I don’t always agree with her, but she’s always thought-provoking and abundantly informed, and I figure anyone following her on Facebook is likely to see things through a lens that’s leagues away from my middle-class liberalism, shot through as it is with white privilege. And while I’m not in a hurry to leave my world, I like to check in on hers often enough to feel like I’m not completely insulated from African-American perspectives.
She posted something along the lines of “Kamala Harris will never be the Democratic nominee.” It was pithy, and provocative, and the comments that followed were generally in agreement. There were something around 135 of them. I read a few, enough to get the distinct impression that these folks (most, or all, POC) didn’t share my mild objections to Harris. They were very much opposed to her, with no ambiguity or wiggle room. In this group, she was seen as an enemy, the latest in a long line of people who’d used their ethnic background to gain power, without really representing the people they came from. The specific charge was that she’d been an effective and aggressive lieutenant in the fight to put black people behind bars and keep them there, a war that is mostly seen as being fought by racist white men.
Whereas I’d only known about this Harris backstory for about a minute, after casually skimming a recent article, the commenters on this post sounded like it was painfully familiar history for them. They were clear-eyed about it, calm in a way that my post’s white liberal dissenters had NOT been, and convinced that as more of Harris’s noxious record was revealed to the ignorant mainstream who might otherwise be inclined to positive feelings about an extremely photogenic black woman who looked like she was more than ready to take on the old white men that have been ruining our country, it would become clear to all that she was not right for the job.
I find myself wondering what the white liberals who raked me over the coals would say to all of these POC who know more about Harris than we do, and have cared about her for a much longer time. And I submit that, despite all the details I’ve gotten into here about Senator Harris, she really isn’t the subject I’m looking at.
I’m talking about liberals who are convinced that “chinstroking” about the flaws of potential Democratic nominees is the reason why we lose elections. I don’t believe that, as there are a host of complicated and interlocking reasons why Hillary Clinton lost, and I believe Democratic cluelessness about the lives and needs and desires of rural or small town white people was a big one. But this aggressive attempt to shut up a white middle class leftist who isn’t entirely sold on Kamala Harris is really a darker and more tragic, and more dangerous, example of Democratic myopia toward a downmarket constituency. I’m speaking about African-Americans who actually know a lot about what’s been going on in this country far from the media spotlight. Ignore me if you want to, but you ignore them at your peril.
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