Kamala Harris Will Test America's Eagerness to Move into the Future

Joe Biden didn't look, sound, or feel like the future. Kamala Harris does.

Kamala Harris seems destined to be the Democratic nominee for president for the 2024 election now that she’s secured the minimum number of delegates necessary. So it’s about as safe as it possibly could be to start opining on potential election scenarios and what she represents as the potential future leader of the most powerful country in the world.

The key word here is “future”. Whereas Joe Biden represented the past, and a bridge to the future, Kamala Harris would be the carrier of the baton on the other side of the bridge to the beyond.

With Harris being propelled into this role, the difference between the two candidates now becomes about as stark as possible. America will have a pretty simple and obvious choice: Do we want to move into the future now, or stick around a bit longer in the past?

MAGA is salivating about the prospect of being able to employ many of their tried-and-true attack angles. For them, it will be the glory days of 2008-2016, when they used hyped-up birtherism, racism, and misogyny on their main political opponents, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. With Kamala Harris, they get to use all of those at once.

It worked great for them then, riling up their base over several years with perceived grievances they probably didn’t even realize they had until 20 media personalities told them they did. Yes, Obama won twice, but enough rage had been successfully built up to produce the rise of Trump and the MAGA era, and the divisiveness we see today in our government. The right loves the long game, and they play it well. As a result of their years-long campaign of pressure and obstruction, they became a formidable political force to reckon with. The question for MAGA now is, how will this play to a 2024 electoral audience?

At this point, despite Trump’s penchant for norm and institution busting, he’s part of the political establishment. MAGA is in the mainstream of this country now, whether they like it or not (they don’t, hence the constant “rage against the machine” mentality). What was once novel and exciting is now old and tiresome to most. We got a glimpse of this with the response to Biden dropping out of the rate, when record amounts of money were raised for Harris’ presumptive campaign. America is apparently thirsting for something new and exciting.

America seems ready and primed to move beyond the ugliness of Trumpism and MAGA. Why wouldn’t they be?

What have people gained from MAGA reaching the pinnacle of American politics? According to MAGA, America is still in decline, the border is still too open, and white people still can’t get ahead. The only way for them to achieve a reversal of these things is to take the next step into strongman ironfisted rule. And they have not been shy about stating this as their exact goal.

American has historically not been keen on falling into the authoritarian trap, and there’s no reason to think they would be now. Fifty years of creeping right-wing rule, culminating in the absolute control of the Supreme Court, which has now become the activist court that conservatives have been decrying for fifty years, is grating on the souls of most Americans.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade, the disintegration of the administrative state, and the head-scratching establishment of highly favorable immunity rules for a president, has alarmed people to the point of saying “enough”.

MAGA is the drunken sailor of conservatism run amok. The nation is now regretting having ever given it the last bottle of whiskey.

In Kamala Harris, Americans can see and hear its future contrasted with the tired old caricature of the embarrassing aspects of its past. She’ll represent more “hope” and “change”, without ever using that catchphrase, than Obama did. This is because the Republican party and a large segment of the country has sunk even further into depths of insanity than ever thought possible at the end of the Bush years, when Obama was rising up. By definition, the feelings of hope and change will be of much higher intensity know than they were then. Remember when George W. Bush seemed like the worst America had to offer? So quaint.

America seems to be ready for this. It seems ready to jump back into the future. When it does so, it also needs to be ready to stay there. There will be rabid, vicious dogs gnashing at its legs as it runs, but it must kick them off and continue.

We know how this may go. We recently lived through it. In Harris, we have a chance at a redo, and a much better story of the future.

The choice is clearer now to everyone than it was three days ago. This is good. It makes the choice more obvious. Harris on one side, Trump on the other. The exciting future on one side, the dusty past on the other.

I think America will choose wisely.