We'll always have Harris
The alternative to the alternative, and good and bad news for Orbánism
This newsletter is devoted to post-invasion Europe so my apologies for another diversion from the Old to the New World. But, since Americans’ second sneeze in eight years is threatening to give us all pneumonia, the US presidential election is a European story.
I subscribe to Josh Szeps’ Uncomfortable Conversations and, as a rule, I like his unusual combination of socially liberal Wokescepticism and resistance to the new right. I even managed to listen to his drawl-off with conservative provocateur Douglas Murray at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre without kicking anything. That is - until an audience member asked Murray whether he wanted Joe Biden or Donald Trump to win the election in November. Like too many conservatives who claim to prioritise Ukraine’s victory over Russia and who despise political and cultural relativism, Murray answered the question by dodging it:
DM: One thing that would be even madder than the Trump presidency would be the Kamala Harris presidency.
JS: Yeah but with Trump, you get 100% certainty. With the corpse [Biden], there's still a chance.
DM: And with Harris?
JS: Well there's still a chance that you avoid Harris, I mean.
DM: No I don't think there is. No, no. He's not going to make it through another four years. No way. Even if Jill Biden is propping him up ... It would be worth it to see Kamala Harris riffing a bit more. Nothing gives me more pleasure than Kamala Harris dealing with a very complex-sounding question and talking about it as if she's thought about it.
So, a second Trump term would be preferable to a Harris presidency because of her notorious “word salads” and gaffes; her latest being an erroneous claim that women’s basketball had no “bracket” - a chart showing an even number of teams competing in rounds until one is left - until last year. This massive story is dominating conservative media this weekend. Okay, they lack perspective but it’s also true that, unless she’s reading a speech, Harris is a terrible public communicator – socially awkward, hand-waving, verbally impenetrable, and liable to burst into laughter for no obvious reason.
However, she has one superpower: she’s not Trump. As Biden says way too often: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative". Murray isn’t stupid but this argument (and Szeps’ acceptance of it) is. Let’s start with communications. In February, Trump bragged to a religious broadcasters’ convention that he’d made Israel the capital of Israel before adding: “They want you to say what they want you, what they want to have you say. And we’re not gonna let that happen. You’re going to say as you want and you’re going to believe, and you’re going to believe in God. You’re gonna believe in God because God is here, and God is watching”.
This isn’t a one-off but oratorical incontinence is the least of Trump’s downsides. How do Trump and Harris compete on policy? For free-trading, small-government, pro-Israel and pro-Ukraine public intellectuals, what is it that makes isolationist, big-spending, Putinophile Trump preferable to Harris’ assumption of the presidency from the 2026 midterms? They clearly know more than the rest of us because Harris, her governing philosophy, and her team are a closed book. Literally. You could fill a library with behind-closed-doors accounts of the Trump and Biden White Houses. Yet, the only book on a woman an 81-year-old’s heartbeat away from the presidency - Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House by Charlie Spiering - is a policy-free tale of a Golden State social climber, her chaotic staff operation, and Biden’s mistake in choosing her by a conservative reporter no Democrat would have briefed.
As a prosecutor in San Francisco and as California’s attorney general, she “triangulated” by being tough on guns and tough on the causes of guns. She swung left during her short Senate stint to prepare for Democratic primaries where she would have to compensate for her prosecutorial record. Her positions became so ill-defined and her campaign so dysfunctional that she dropped out of the race before the primaries began and waited for Biden’s call. He had other (better) women of colour available for the role but, according to Jonathan Martin’s and Alexander Burns’ detailed account1 of his hiring process, Biden chose the “safe” option. The trouble with this make-do approach was that Harris was never trusted once Democrats took the White House - a sentiment bolstered by the vice president’s clown-show office operation. Harris was neither given nor assumed a serious profile or portfolio to bulk her up for 2024 or beyond.
She has, nevertheless, taken an important role in Ukraine-related diplomacy over the past two years - beginning with intelligence-sharing on Russian plans with presidents Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky before 24 February 2022. Unlike Trump and Congressional Republicans, she has been everything a neocon would want over Russian revanchism, telling this year’s Munich Security Conference: “Imagine if we went easy on Putin, let alone encouraged him. History offers a clue. If we stand by while an aggressor invades its neighbour with impunity, they will keep going”. On economic policy, she set out a radical agenda for her primary run in 2019-20 but, in office, she hired a Blackrock alumnus as her chief policy aide and has never deviated from a policy mix that has pulled core inflation below 3% while keeping the unemployment rate under 4%.
Susan Rice would have been a better vice-presidential choice but, if Americans re-elect Biden in November and he resigns or dies before 2029, Harris will be fine. Capitalism and NATO will survive. So will liberal democracy. Saying she will be “madder” than Trump is a lie conservatives tell themselves to stay in the tribe.
The eastern front
Liberal democracy received another blow yesterday with the election of Peter Pellegrini, the anointed candidate of Robert Fico, as Slovakia’s new president. Tight late polls had allowed militant democrats to dream that retired diplomat Ivan Korčok could repeat last year’s presidential victory for Petr Pavel in Czechia.
Instead, Slovaks turned out in higher-than-usual numbers to provide a 53/47% vote of confidence in Ficoism – a less confident (and nominally left-wing) version of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s clientelist cocktail of social conservatism, welfarism, selective euroscepticism, and trollish Russophilia.
The predictable 50/50 cultural split between metropolitan and rural districts that have defined recent politics in the US, UK, Poland, Hungary, and Czechia were on display again as the population centres - Bratislava, Prešov and Košice – broke for Korčok.
Having lost his friends in Warsaw, Orbán needed reinforcement in the EU and the Fico-Pellegrini duo is better than nothing. Domestically, things are starting to look shaky after 14 unbroken years of pure, constitution-rewriting Orbánism. The improbable rise of Péter Magyar (talk about nominative determinism) has the prime minister and his hangers-on more alarmed than they’re letting on. When regimes fall, it’s not usually the longest-standing and most virtuous opposition leaders who assume power. It’s often undeserving insiders. Annoying but how it is. I’ll write more about this but chose to spare you another Orbán photo.
Pick of the pods
No, I don’t work in Tortoise Media’s marketing team but I do like their new Putin’s Murders series anchored by Giles Whittell. The story has been told at book length by Catherine Belton and John Sweeney but this podcast captures the gangster king’s paranoia and the human cost of his long reign in bitesize form. This week’s Haaretz podcast, on which Yair Ettinger talks about his book on the crumbling political alliances between “Religious Zionists”, is fascinating. Finally, here’s a plug for Talk Eastern Europe and its debate (from 16:30) over post-”election” politics in Belarus - a cold topic that may one day turn very hot indeed.
Chapter 2: Fire and Forget
Ta. Didn't know I knew nothing about Kamala Harris, and even less about women's basketball. But I don't.